Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced the creation of a new AI research group called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), part of a sweeping effort to reorganize the company’s artificial intelligence initiatives and build “personal superintelligence for everyone,” according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider.
The new lab will be led by Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who joined Meta earlier this month after the company invested $14.3 billion in his data-labeling startup. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and a prominent AI investor, will partner with Wang to co-lead MSL’s research and product initiatives.
“As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight,” Zuckerberg wrote in the memo, which Bloomberg first reported on. “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.”
Zuckerberg emphasized that Meta’s AI efforts aim to build systems that are not only as capable as humans, but “personal”, deeply integrated into how people interact with technology.
The announcement comes amid a broader and increasingly aggressive push by Meta to compete with OpenAI and Google in the race to build the most advanced AI systems. AI has become Zuckerberg’s top priority this year, fueling massive investments in infrastructure like chips and data centers, and a hiring spree targeting researchers from rival labs.
In addition to the Scale AI investment, Meta has reportedly held acquisition talks with Perplexity and Runway. The company is also reportedly expected to acquire PlayAI, a voice replication startup, as part of its push into AI personal assistants.
Read Zuckerberg’s full memo below:
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 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, o4-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
- Joel Pobar — inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, React, performance tooling, and machine learning.
- 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.
I’m excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We’re committed to continuing to build out these models.
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.
Are you a current or former Meta employee with more insight to share? Got a tip? You can contact Hugh Langley securely on Signal at hughlangley.01 or email at hlangley@businessinsider.com, or Pranav Dixit on Signal at +1408-905-9124 or email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com. Use a non work device.
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