After Meta’s aggressive push to recruit AI talent, the company is restructuring its artificial intelligence group, called Meta Superintelligence Labs, to keep the momentum going.
“Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organize around the key areas that will be critical to reach it — research, product and infra,” wrote Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined Meta from Scale AI in June, in an internal memo reviewed by Bloomberg.
What are Meta’s new AI groups?
Meta’s new AI groups include:
- TBD Lab, focused on large language models such as Llama.
- FAIR, or fundamental AI research, a group dedicated to long-term research.
- Products and Applied Research, focused on consumer products.
- MSL Infra, focused on infrastructure.
Previously, Meta had three AI groups: FAIR, an AI products group, and the AGI foundations team. MSL Infra was added in June.
Leadership of Meta Superintelligence Labs has shifted as well:
- Former AGI foundations bosses Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel are now working on MSL.
- Connor Hayes, who formerly led the AI products group, moved to Meta’s social media site Threads.
- Robert Fergus, a co-founder of FAIR and its long-time leader, will return to FAIR after working for Alphabet for several years on DeepMind research.
No one was laid off as part of the restructuring, Bloomberg’s source said.
Meta pursues superintelligence
The restructuring is intended to point Meta’s pricey new recruits toward the ultimate goal of superintelligence, or AI that surpasses human capabilities. This goal echoes OpenAI’s longstanding pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a technology that performs better than humans at “most economically valuable work.”
Meta also competes with Google to build and commercialize advanced large language models.
As such, Meta had been offering sky-high pay packages to cornerstone AI professionals who were willing to switch companies. Microsoft, in turn, is trying to lure individual Meta rockstars — or “critical AI talent” — with multimillion-dollar bonuses and lofty, individually-crafted pay packages.
It’s a good time to be an AI engineer.
In other news, Texas Attorney General is investigating whether Character.AI and Meta chatbots impersonated therapists.