Mark Zuckerberg details Meta's superintelligence plans
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Shengjia Zhao — formerly of OpenAI — is the new chief scientist at Meta's new Superintelligence Lab, Mark Zuckerberg announced on Threads on Friday.
Why it matters: The company is spending billions of dollars to hire key employees as it looks to jumpstart its effort and compete with Google, OpenAI and others.
What they're saying: "In this role, Shengjia will set the research agenda and scientific direction for our new lab working directly with me and Alex," Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, meaning former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang.
Catch-up quick: In addition to pay packages reportedly worth up to hundreds of millions of dollars per person in some cases, the company is investing $14.3 billion to take a 49% stake in Scale AI and hire Wang.
- The company has been poaching talent from across the industry, nabbing key folks from Apple, OpenAI and Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence.
- From Apple, Meta grabbed AI experts Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, after hiring their boss, Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple's LLM team, Bloomberg reported.
- Meta also hired Tianhe Yu, Cosmo Du and Weiyue Wang, three of the engineers that worked on the Gemini model that achieved gold medal performance at last week's International Mathematical Olympiad, right after the results were announced, per The Information.
Between the lines: Hiring talent is just one part of the equation, of course.
- "We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence," Zuckerberg said in a July 14 Threads post. "We have the capital from our business to do this."
