In Pursuit of Godlike Technology, Mark Zuckerberg Amps Up the A.I. Race

New York Times

3 days ago

In April, Mark Zuckerberg's lofty plans for the future of artificial intelligence crashed into reality.
Weeks earlier, the 41-year-old chief executive of Meta had publicly boasted that his company's new A.I. model, which would power the latest chatbots and other cutting-edge experiments, would be a 'beast.' Internally, Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that he wanted it to rival the A.I. systems of competitors like OpenAI and be able to drive features such as voice-powered chatbots, people who spoke with him said.
But at Meta's A.I. conference that month, the new A.I. model did not perform as well as those of rivals. Features like voice interactions were not ready. Many developers, who attended the event with high expectations, left underwhelmed.
Mr. Zuckerberg knew Meta was falling behind in A.I., people close to him said, which was unacceptable. He began strategizing in a WhatsApp group with top executives, including Chris Cox, Meta's head of product, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, about what to do.
That kicked off a frenzy of activity that has reverberated across Silicon Valley. Mr. Zuckerberg demoted Meta's vice president in charge of generative A.I. He then invested $14.3 billion in the start-up Scale AI and hired Alexandr Wang, its 28-year-old founder. Meta approached other start-ups, including the A.I. search engine Perplexity, about deals. And Mr. Zuckerberg and his colleagues have embarked on a hiring binge, including reaching out this month to more than 45 A.I. researchers at rival OpenAI alone and offering them compensation packages as high as $100 million each, two people with knowledge of the matter said. Four OpenAI researchers have accepted offers from the company.
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