Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta Superintelligence Labs — with a battalion of AI gurus poached from OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind to try and secure an AGI win

Over the past few weeks, Meta has seemingly been taking an "all gas, no brakes" approach, trying to chase down the AI bubble and catch up with rivals like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft, which seemingly have a significant lead in the landscape.

First order of business, Mark Zuckerberg invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and hired CEO Alexandr Wang to co-lead operations in Meta's new superintelligence lab alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Reports also began to emerge with claims that Mark Zuckerberg was actively poaching AI talent from rival firms in a bid to secure Meta's win in the aggressive AI race. The executive reportedly offered up to $100 million as a signing bonus.

While companies like Google's DeepMind use aggressive non-compete clauses coupled with up to a whole of PTO (paid time off) to prevent its staffers from deflecting to rival fims, Zuckerberg has managed to rally some of the talents in the AI field to run Meta's new AI lab, and potentially catch up with its rivals.

On Monday, Zuckerberg shared an internal memo to Meta's staffers announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs (via Bloomberg). According to the executive:

"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."

Zuckerberg previously revealed that he plans to leverage the new lab to build capable AI models that supersede human capabilities, which will be integrated into how people interact with the technology.

Here's the full internal memo as shared by Mark Zuckerberg to Meta staffers:

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.

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.