- Meta launches “Superintelligence Labs” to unify all internal AI efforts
- Alexandr Wang appointed Chief AI Officer; will lead the lab alongside Nat Friedman
- Zuckerberg has recruited top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic
- Meta invested $14.3B in Scale AI to bolster AI development capacity
- The new division includes Meta’s FAIR and foundational model teams
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced a sweeping overhaul of the company’s artificial intelligence initiatives, creating a new internal division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to a memo obtained by Virginia Times.
Going forward, all teams working on AI at Meta will fall under a new group called “Meta Superintelligence Labs”, according to Bloomberg, which viewed an internal memo and first reported on Monday.
“We’re going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo. Meta declined to comment.
Zuckerberg Taps Alexandr Wang and Nat Friedman for Leadership
The newly created MSL will be co-led by Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI — a company in which Meta recently invested $14.3 billion — and Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub. Wang will serve as Meta’s new Chief AI Officer, leading the company’s strategic push into artificial general intelligence (AGI) and beyond.
Friedman will focus on AI product innovation and applied research in collaboration with Wang. The pair will direct the lab’s priorities and further scale Meta’s capabilities across generative AI and superintelligence research.
High-Profile AI Experts Join Meta’s Ranks
The memo includes an extensive list of high-profile AI researchers and engineers who recently joined Meta. Many of them were poached from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and other leading AI labs.
Here’s the full list of newly announced hires:
- Trapit Bansal — Pioneered RL on chain-of-thought reasoning; cocreator of o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi — Cocreator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini; led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
- Huiwen Chang — GPT-4o image generation lead; inventor of MaskGIT and Muse architectures at Google Research.
- Ji Lin — Key developer for GPT-4, 4.1, 4.5, 4o-imagegen, and Operator stack.
- Joel Pobar — Inference specialist at Anthropic; former Meta engineer with expertise in Hack, Flow, and ML tooling.
- Jack Rae — Pre-training tech lead for Gemini; led early LLMs like Gopher and Chinchilla at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren — Built GPT-4o and several mini models; led post-training at OpenAI.
- Johan Schalkwyk — Former Google Fellow; contributed to Sesame and led Maya at Google.
- Pei Sun — Led Gemini reasoning and coding; developed last two generations of Waymo perception models.
- Jiahui Yu — Former OpenAI and Gemini perception team lead; worked on GPT-4.1 and O-series.
- Shengjia Zhao — Co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models; led synthetic data at OpenAI.
Outlook
With this major structural overhaul and the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs, Zuckerberg is signaling his ambition to leapfrog competitors like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind in the race for artificial superintelligence. Analysts note that Meta’s ability to integrate foundational research with practical product applications could define the next chapter in global AI dominance.
As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way. Today I want to share some details about how we’re organizing our AI efforts to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.
We’re going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models.
Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to serve as our Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry.
Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Alex to lead MSL, heading our work on AI products and applied research. Nat will work with Connor to define his role going forward. He ran GitHub at Microsoft, and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do.
We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I’m excited to share as well:
- Trapit Bansal — pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAI.
- Shuchao Bi — co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAI.
- Huiwen Chang — co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research.
- Ji Lin — helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 4o-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar — inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- Jack Rae — pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
- Hongyu Ren — co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAI.
- Johan Schalkwyk — former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
- Pei Sun — post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
- Jiahui Yu — co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o. Previously led the perception team at OpenAI, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.
- Shengjia Zhao — co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.
In parallel, we’re going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I’ve spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort. We’re still forming this group and we’ll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.
Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world. We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people. We are pioneering and leading the AI glasses and wearables category that is growing very quickly. And our company structure allows us to move with vastly greater conviction and boldness. I’m optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone.
We have even more great people at all levels joining this effort in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. I’m excited to dive in and get to work.
(with inputs from Virginia Times internal sources and Bloomberg)
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