Today's Edition
SAN FRANCISCO (THE NEW YORK TIMES NEW SERVICE)
Meta is preparing to unveil a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing "superintelligence,” a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain, as the tech giant jockeys to stay competitive in the technology race.
Meta has tapped Alexandr Wang, 28, the founder and CEO of AI startup Scale AI, to join the new lab, sources said, and has been in talks to invest billions of dollars in his company as part of a deal that would also bring other Scale AI employees to the company.
Meta has reportedly offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Google, with some agreeing to join, sources added.
The new lab is part of a larger reorganisation of Meta’s AI efforts.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has invested billions of dollars into turning his company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, into an AI powerhouse.
Since OpenAI released the ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, the tech industry has raced to build increasingly powerful AI. Zuckerberg has pushed his company to incorporate AI across its products, including in its smart glasses and a recently released app, Meta AI.
Staying in the race is crucial for Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft, with the technology likely to be the future for the industry. The giants have pumped money into startups and their own AI labs.
Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, while Amazon has plowed $8 billion into AI startup Anthropic.
The behemoths have also spent billions to hire employees from high-profile startups and license their technology. Last year, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license technology and hire technologists and executives from Character.AI, a startup that builds chatbots for personal conversations.
In February, Zuckerberg, 41, called AI "potentially one of the most important innovations in history.” He added, "This year is going to set the course for the future.”
Meta and Scale AI declined to comment. Bloomberg earlier reported that Wang was joining the new Meta lab.
Superintelligence is regarded by leading researchers to be a futuristic goal of AI development.
OpenAI, Google and others have said their immediate aim is to build "artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, shorthand for a machine that can do anything the human brain can do, which is an ambition with no clear path to success. Superintelligence, if it can be developed, would go beyond AGI in its power.
Meta has invested in AI for more than a decade. Zuckerberg created the company’s first dedicated AI lab in 2013, after losing out to Google in trying to acquire a seminal startup called DeepMind. DeepMind is now the core of Google’s AI efforts.
Since then, Meta’s research efforts have been overseen by its chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, who is also a New York University professor. LeCun is a pioneer of neural networks, the technology that drives ChatGPT and similar systems.
After ChatGPT caused an explosion of interest in AI, Meta deployed additional resources to pursue the technology.
One of Meta’s strategies for gaining ground in AI has been to "open source” its software, essentially giving away its AI code freely so that developers and others adopt its tools. The company released an open-source AI model, Llama, and its chatbot product, Meta AI.
Meta AI was incorporated across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as well as in its Ray-Ban smart glasses. In May, Zuckerberg said more than 1 billion people used Meta AI every month.
