From the Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg Announces New Meta ‘Superintelligence Labs’ Unit and a partial reorganization of Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg announced a new “Superintelligence” division within Meta Platforms, officially organizing an effort that has been the subject of an intense recruiting blitz in recent months.
Former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang will lead the team as chief AI officer, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will lead the company’s work on AI products, according to an internal memo Zuckerberg sent to employees that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
This after another WSJ article last week about “the list”, designed to ameliorate Meta’s recent disappointing Llama work.
All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about “The List,” a compilation of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together.
Facebooks’ pivot from virtual reality / metaverse (Facebook -> Meta) to AI suggests that the metaverse was the wrong bet. I suspect Zuckerberg knows it, too, but this huge spending spree aligns with Zuck’s ethos, move fast and break things.
In a world where a really good basketball player (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) can command $285 million over four years, spending upwards of $100 million per transformative engineer seems like a relative bargain.