Latest news with #MSL
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Meta establishes MSL to accelerate AI development
Meta has established a new division called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to consolidate its AI initiatives. In an internal memo, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation of the new unit. Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, will serve as the chief AI officer of MSL. Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, will co-lead the division, focusing on AI products and applied research. The new lab is expected to accelerate the development of artificial general intelligence and enhance revenue streams through the Meta AI app, image-to-video advertising tools, and smart glasses. In addition to Wang and Friedman, Meta has recruited 11 AI specialists, with backgrounds from organisations such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Notable hires include former DeepMind researchers Jack Rae and Pei Sun, as well as OpenAI alumni Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren, and Anthropic's Joel Pobar. "Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world," Zuckerberg stated in the internal memo, as reported by CNBC. '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.' This strategic shift from Meta follows the recent senior staff departures and lacklustre reception of Meta's latest open-source Llama 4 model. The company also faces potential daily fines if its pay-or-consent model does not comply with European Union antitrust regulations. According to Reuters, major technology companies are projected to invest $320bn in AI in 2025. "Meta establishes MSL to accelerate AI development" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Time of India
10 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Read Mark Zuckerberg's full memo to employees on Meta Superintelligence Labs: We are going to …
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has officially announced the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs . The new division aims to develop 'personal superintelligence for everyone' and will be led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang as its Chief AI Officer. This move follows Meta's recent $14.3 billion acquisition of Wang's data-labeling startup. Wang will co-lead MSL alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who will focus on AI products and applied research. In a memo sent to employees, Zuckerberg also introduced the full team of 11 members who the company has hired from competitors like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. Read Meta CEO's full memo to his employees: 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. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
Time of India
10 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Inside Meta's Superintelligence Lab: The scientists Mark Zuckerberg handpicked; the race to build real AGI
Mark Zuckerberg has rarely been accused of thinking small. After attempting to redefine the internet through the metaverse, he's now set his sights on a more ambitious frontier: superintelligence—the idea that machines can one day match, or even surpass, the general intelligence of humans. To that end, Meta has created an elite unit with a name that sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi script: Meta Superintelligence Lab (MSL). But this isn't fiction. It's a real-world, founder-led moonshot, powered by aggressive hiring, audacious capital, and a cast of technologists who've quietly shaped today's AI landscape. This is not just a story of algorithms and GPUs. It's about power, persuasion, and the elite brains Zuckerberg believes will push Meta into the next epoch of intelligence. The architects: Who's running Meta's AGI Ambitions? Zuckerberg has never been one to let bureaucracy slow him down. So he didn't delegate the hiring for MSL—he did it himself. The three minds now driving this initiative are not traditional corporate executives. They are product-obsessed builders, technologists who operate with startup urgency and almost missionary belief in Artificial general intelligence (AGI). Name Role at MSL Past Lives Education Alexandr Wang Chief AI Officer, Head of MSL Founder, Scale AI MIT dropout (Computer Science) Nat Friedman Co-lead, Product & Applied AI CEO, GitHub; Microsoft executive B.S. Computer Science & Math, MIT Daniel Gross (Joining soon, role TBD) Co-founder, Safe Superintelligence; ex-Apple, YC No degree; accepted into Y Combinator at 18 Wang, once dubbed the world's youngest self-made billionaire, is a data infrastructure prodigy who understands what it takes to feed modern AI. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like My baby is in so much pain, please help us? Donate For Health Donate Now Undo Friedman, a revered figure in the open-source community, knows how to productise deep tech. And Gross, who reportedly shares Zuckerberg's intensity, brings a perspective grounded in AI alignment and risk. Together, they form a high-agency, no-nonsense leadership core—Zuckerberg's version of a Manhattan Project trio. The Scientists: 11 defections that shook the AI world If leadership provides the vision, the next 11 are the ones expected to engineer it. In a hiring spree that rattled OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic, Meta recruited some of the world's most sought-after researchers—those who helped build GPT-4, Gemini, and several of the most important multimodal models of the decade. Name Recruited From Expertise Education Jack Rae DeepMind LLMs, long-term memory in AI CMU, UCL Pei Sun DeepMind Structured reasoning (Gemini project) Tsinghua, CMU Trapit Bansal OpenAI Chain-of-thought prompting, model alignment IIT Kanpur, UMass Amherst Shengjia Zhao OpenAI Alignment, co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4 Tsinghua, Stanford Ji Lin OpenAI Model optimization, GPT-4 scaling Tsinghua, MIT Shuchao Bi OpenAI Speech-text integration Zhejiang, UC Berkeley Jiahui Yu OpenAI/Google Gemini vision, GPT-4 multimodal USTC, UIUC Hongyu Ren OpenAI Robustness and safety in LLMs Peking Univ., Stanford Huiwen Chang Google Muse, MaskIT – next-gen image generation Tsinghua, Princeton Johan Schalkwyk Sesame AI/Google Voice AI, led Google's voice search efforts Univ. of Pretoria Joel Pobar Anthropic/Meta Infrastructure, PyTorch optimization QUT (Australia) This roster isn't just impressive on paper—it's a coup. Several were responsible for core components of GPT-4's reasoning, efficiency, and voice capabilities. Others led image generation innovations like Muse or built memory modules crucial for scaling up AI's attention spans. Meta's hires reflect a global brain gain: most completed their undergrad education in China or India, and pursued PhDs in the US or UK. It's a clear signal to students—brilliance isn't constrained by geography. What Meta offered: Money, mission, and total autonomy Convincing this calibre of talent to switch sides wasn't easy. Meta offered more than mission—it offered unprecedented compensation. • Some were offered up to $300 million over four years. • Sign-on bonuses of $50–100 million were on the table for top OpenAI researchers. • The first year's payout alone reportedly crossed $100 million for certain hires. This level of compensation places them above most Fortune 500 CEOs—not for running a company, but for building the future. It's also part of a broader message: Zuckerberg is willing to spend aggressively to win this race. OpenAI's Sam Altman called it "distasteful." Others at Anthropic and DeepMind described the talent raid as 'alarming.' Meta, meanwhile, has made no apologies. In the words of one insider: 'This is the team that gets to skip the red tape. They sit near Mark. They move faster than anyone else at Meta.' The AGI problem: Bigger than just scaling up But even with all the talent and capital in the world, AGI remains the toughest problem in computer science. The goal isn't to make better chatbots or faster image generators. It's to build machines that can reason, plan, and learn like humans. Why is that so hard? • Generalisation: Today's models excel at pattern recognition, not abstract reasoning. They still lack true understanding. • Lack of theory: There is no grand unified theory of intelligence. Researchers are working without a blueprint. • Massive compute: AGI may require an order of magnitude more compute than even GPT-4 or Gemini. • Safety and alignment: Powerful models can behave in unexpected, even dangerous ways. Getting them to want what humans want remains an unsolved puzzle. To solve these, Meta isn't just scaling up—it's betting on new architectures, new training methods, and new safety frameworks. It's also why several of its new hires have deep expertise in AI alignment and multimodal reasoning. What this means for students aiming their future in AI This story isn't just about Meta. It's about the direction AI is heading—and what it takes to get to the frontier. If you're a student in India wondering how to break into this world, take notes: • Strong math and computer science foundations matter. Most researchers began with robust undergrad training before diving into AI. • Multimodality, alignment, and efficiency are key emerging areas. Learn to work across language, vision, and reasoning. • Internships, open-source contributions, and research papers still open doors faster than flashy resumes. • And above all, remember: AI is as much about values as it is about logic. The future won't just be built by engineers—it'll be shaped by ethicists, philosophers, and policy thinkers too. Is your child ready for the careers of tomorrow? Enroll now and take advantage of our early bird offer! Spaces are limited.
CNBC
a day ago
- Business
- CNBC
Mark Zuckerberg's costly AI talent push has not cost Meta stock yet. Here's why
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an artificial intelligence spending blitz — and Wall Street does not seem to mind. Zuckerberg has invested tens of billions of dollars in computing infrastructure and research and development, and he's worked tirelessly to implement AI across the internal organization and to enhance user engagement and ad targeting on Instagram and Facebook. In the latest phase of these efforts, Zuckerberg has ripped a page out of New York Mets owner Steve Cohen's playbook and thrown huge amounts money at top AI talent to build out a "superintelligence" unit, with the goal of recruiting 50 top researchers in the field. Just how aggressive have these efforts been? In a note to clients on Tuesday, Bank of America estimated that Zuckerberg's spending spree could add $1 billion in annual expenses, assuming 50 people at an average of $20 million in compensation. Yes, $1 billion. And yet, the Street has been willing to look past the jaw-dropping spending — and it's not difficult to see why, considering the opportunity AI brings on both cost savings and revenue growth opportunities. The stock closed Monday at its first record high since mid-February, though we're likely seeing some profit-taking in Tuesday's overall down market. Between the close on Friday, June 6, and Monday, shares of Meta rose nearly 6% versus a 3.4% advance for the S & P 500. The June 6 date is relevant because over that weekend, Bloomberg News first reported that Meta was in talks to invest in Scale AI — the opening salvo in this spending spree. Zuckerberg is far from alone in the urgency and recognition of the opportunity. Consider what Club name Amazon's chief executive, Andy Jassy, told Jim Cramer on Monday night on "Mad Money." "I think that AI and generative AI specifically is the most transformative technology of our lifetime, which is saying a lot given we've had the internet, we've had mobile, we've had the cloud. But I think it's going to end up being the most transformative technology of our lifetime. If your mission is to make customers' lifetimes easier and better everyday — and if you believe it's going to be the most transformative of our lifetime — you're going to invest very expansively, which is what we're doing, and you can see it everywhere." The phrase "invest very expansively" stands out, in particular. Zuckerberg clearly agrees, writing in a memo to employees Monday : "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." In the same memo obtained by CNBC, Zuckerberg laid out the internal structure for AI research at Meta. At the highest level, the efforts fall under what is being called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Within MSL, Meta will house all of its "foundations, product, and FAIR [Fundamental AI Research] teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of models." One of the two people tapped to lead MSL is Alexandr Wang, the now-former CEO of Scale AI whose hiring earlier this month underscored Zuckerberg's aggressiveness in hiring AI talent. Just days after that initial Bloomberg report, Meta officially invested more than $14 billion to acquire a 49% stake in ScaleAI — a move viewed by many as an "acquihire" because a key factor behind the move was bringing Wang on board. Wang will serve as Meta's chief AI officer. The other co-leader of MSL is the recently hired Nat Friedman, CEO of GitLabs from 2018 to 2022. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also claimed that Zuckerberg, who has been personally involved in the hiring of AI talent, has offered up signing bonuses of as much as $100 million to poach top talent from leading AI organizations like his own. While there's been some pushback on Altman's claim , the general point stands: Zuckerberg has opened up the wallet. Bank of America's estimate makes that clear. Additional new hires brought in to aide Meta's AI efforts come from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic and include. Here's how Zuckerberg described the resumes of the hires in the memo obtained by CNBC: 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 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," Zuckerberg wrote. While Zuckerberg clearly has no issue paying up for talent, the question is: At what point would investors start to take issue? As we saw in 2022, sometimes the market will recoil at aggressive spending. This time around, our belief is that as long as Meta can show material progress with updates to existing products and more capable large language models, Zuckerberg will continue to get the pass on AI spend. These investments have already delivered benefits to user engagement and ad targeting; in other words, they've made the core Family of Apps business better. However, its Llama large language model — which underpins its ChatGPT rival known as Meta AI — is now on its fourth version and has failed to impress. It's lagging behind competing models from the likes of Google and OpenAI in third-party testing, according to the leaderboard . Improving Llama is no doubt a key initiative of the new unit, and investors will want to see progress here as they evaluate the hefty spending. While it's great to see Meta implement AI across the organization to the benefit of existing revenue streams, it is new revenue streams — stemming from AI initiatives like Llama — that will really get investors excited about the spend and propel shares higher over the long term. Another possibility: Meta's AI-infused smart glasses, which are part of its Reality Labs division, stand to benefit from a more capable Meta AI model. As the model improves, we wouldn't be surprised to see additional offerings, such as a premium Llama subscription and new tools for business customers. In the end, as is the case with all those pumping huge amounts into AI research, it comes down to the companies' ability to monetize that research. Fortunately, Meta has plenty of optionality on this front, both in terms of additional cost savings internally, along with the proven ability to enhance existing products and build out new ones. (Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust is long META and AMZN. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust's portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. 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Express Tribune
a day ago
- Business
- Express Tribune
Mark Zuckerberg announces launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), a new AI unit intended to position the company at the forefront of artificial general intelligence development. The unit will bring together Meta's existing teams working on foundation models including the open-source Llama model and its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division. It will also launch a new lab focused on what Zuckerberg described as 'the next generation' of models. MSL will be led by Alexandr Wang, former chief executive of Scale AI, who joins Meta as chief AI officer. He will work alongside Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and a partner in the AI venture capital scene, who will oversee product and applied research efforts. The announcement, made via an internal memo obtained by CNBC, comes as Meta accelerates its recruitment drive amid intense competition with OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft for top AI talent. The company recently hired Wang and several colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment in AI infrastructure. It also recruited Friedman and Daniel Gross, both previously involved with Safe Superintelligence, the AI venture co-founded by OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever. In his memo, Zuckerberg said the emergence of superintelligence marked 'the beginning of a new era for humanity,' and that Meta was 'fully committed' to leading in its development. 'Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world,' he added, citing its scale, infrastructure, and experience in global product deployment. The new division will include high-profile hires from leading labs such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic. Zuckerberg also highlighted Meta's roadmap for Llama 4.1 and 4.2, which are already integrated across Meta platforms and used by more than a billion people monthly. Alongside this, the company is initiating work on its next set of frontier models, with a 'small, talent-dense' team still in formation. The creation of MSL signals Meta's strategic intent to move beyond consumer-facing AI assistants and invest in foundational AI infrastructure. The announcement also reinforces Zuckerberg's vision of 'personal superintelligence for everyone'—a competitive stake in the rapidly evolving global AI landscape. Zuckerberg concluded his note by hinting at more talent announcements in the coming weeks, describing the effort as 'a new influx of talent and a parallel approach to model development.'
