History
In June 2025, Bloomberg News reported that Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, had expressed displeasure at Llama 4, the company's large language model released in April, tasking employees to work overtime. In response, Meta began internally developing Behemoth, a larger model set to be more sophisticated than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. According to The Wall Street Journal , amid concerns from Meta's leadership over Behemoth's capabilities, the company delayed the release of the model. The decision to delay Behemoth led Zuckerberg to involve himself closely with Meta's AI efforts, starting a WhatsApp group chat with senior leadership to recruit researchers. According to Bloomberg News, Zuckerberg set a goal to hire approximately fifty people to staff a firm to achieve artificial general intelligence. [1]
That month, Zuckerberg sought to invest several billion dollars into Scale AI and hire its chief executive and founder, Alexandr Wang. [1] In addition, he had personally recruited researchers at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California; [1] The New York Times later reported that Zuckerberg had offered compensation packages valued between US$1 to US$100 million to employees at OpenAI and Google. [2]
Days later, Meta announced that it was investing US$14.3 billion into Scale AI, an intentionally muted role despite hiring Wang in order to avoid scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission amid an impending decision from judge James Boasberg in FTC v. Meta (2020). [3] According to The Information , Zuckerberg was willing to provide US$5 billion, though Wang countered with US$20 billion. [4] In order to fund the tentative firm, Meta implemented advertisements in WhatsApp. [5] The Information later reported that Meta was discussing hiring Nat Friedman, the former chief executive of GitHub, and the businessman and investor Daniel Gross, and acquiring their venture capital firm, NFDG. [6]
According to CNBC, Meta had sought to acquire Safe Superintelligence Inc., but its CEO Ilya Sutskever refused the acquisition. [7] Additionally, Zuckerberg privately discussed acquiring Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity AI, though the deals fell through over disputes concerning prices and strategy. Days later, The Verge reported that Gross and Friedman would report directly beneath Wang. [8] [9] Zuckerberg assumed a dominant role in hiring employees, [10] though his efforts faced complications from researchers who expressed skepticism at Meta's artificial intelligence, uncertainty over internal restructuring, and a perceived strategic conflict with Meta's vice president for artificial intelligence, Yann LeCun. [11] Additionally, several researchers were surprised to receive messages from Zuckerberg, including one person who, believing a message they received to be a hoax, did not respond for several days. [11]
On June 30, Zuckerberg announced that he was establishing Meta Superintelligence Labs with Wang serving as chief AI officer and Friedman leading work on AI products. Meta AI (formerly Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research) and several other divisions, including a new team called TBD Lab, dedicated to "developing the next generation" of Meta's large language models, were placed beneath Meta Superintelligence Labs. [12] [13] In an internal memo, Zuckerberg named eleven employees the company had hired. [14] Zuckerberg's efforts forced other AI company executives, including Microsoft's Satya Nadella and OpenAI's Sam Altman, to attract researchers themselves. [15] In July, Gross joined Superintelligence Labs as Friedman's counterpart. [16] That month, The New York Times reported that Superintelligence Labs executives had discussed a proprietary AI model. [17]
In August, Meta restructured Meta Superintelligence Labs into four subgroups. [18]