Meta is shelling out big bucks to get ahead in AI. Here’s who it’s hiring

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg looks on before the luncheon on the inauguration day of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term in Washington, U.S., January 20. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters/File via CNN Newsource)

New York — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission for his company to be the first to reach so-called artificial superintelligence — generally considered to mean AI that’s better than all humans at all knowledge work.

It’s a nebulous and likely far-out concept that some analysts say may not immediately benefit the company’s core business. Yet Zuckerberg is shelling out huge sums to build an all-star team of researchers and engineers to beat OpenAI and other rivals to it.

Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree, which has reportedly included multimillion-dollar pay packages to lure top talent away from key rivals, has kicked off a talent race within the AI industry. Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed Meta was offering his employees US$100 million signing bonuses to switch companies. And just this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked during an earnings call about his company’s status in the AI talent war, a sign that Wall Street is now also invested in the competition.

The stakes are high for Zuckerberg — after Meta’s pivot to the metaverse fell flat, he’s reoriented the company around AI in hopes of being a leader in the next transformational technology wave. The company has invested billions in data centers and chips to power its AI ambitions that it’s now under pressure to deliver on. Unlike other tech giants, Meta doesn’t have a cloud computing business to generate immediate revenue from those infrastructure investments. And the company is coming from somewhat behind competitors, after reported delays in releasing the largest version of its new Llama 4 AI model.

“That’s the Llama 4 lesson: You can have hundreds of thousands of (GPU chips), but if you don’t have the right team developing the model, it doesn’t matter,” said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria.

But more than anything, Zuckerberg appears to be in a circle of Silicon Valley “AI maximalists” that believe the technology will change everything about how we live and work. Becoming a leader in the space is essential to Meta and other companies whose leaders follow that line of thinking, Luria said.

“For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,” Zuckerberg said in a Threads post earlier this month.

Meta last month invested $14.3 billion in data labeling startup Scale AI. Scale founder and then-CEO Alexandr Wang joined the social media giant as part of the deal, along with several of Scale’s other top employees. Wang is now leading the new Meta Superintelligence Labs team, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

“My job is to make amazing AI products that billions of people love to use,” Friedman said in an X post earlier this month. “It won’t happen overnight, but a few days in, I’m feeling confident that great things are ahead.”

On Friday, Zuckerberg announced that Shengjia Zhao, one of the co-creators of ChatGPT who Meta hired away from OpenAI several weeks ago, will be chief scientist of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Zhao will “set the research agenda and scientific direction” for the team, Zuckerberg said. (Meta’s existing chief scientist, Yann LeCun, who has been with the company for more than a decade, will remain in his position leading the company’s Fundamental AI Research team, a spokesperson confirmed.)

In recent weeks, Meta has also attracted top researchers and engineers from Apple, Google and Anthropic. Multiple news outlets, including Bloomberg, Wired and The Verge, have reported that Meta has, in some cases, offered pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to new AI hires. It’s a sign of just how far Zuckerberg is willing to go in his quest to win the AI superintelligence race, although the Meta chief has pushed back on some of the reporting around the compensation figures.

It is with that mission that Meta’s new team will be working to build superintelligence. Here are some of the most prominent recent hires to the team. This list was compiled based on public statements, social media profiles and posts, and news reports, and may not be exhaustive. Meta declined to comment on this story.

Zuckerberg’s drive to get ahead on AI may be rooted in part in his desire to own a foundational platform for the next major technology wave.

Meta lost the race to control the operating systems for the mobile web era in the early 2000s and 2010s, which Apple and Google won. In recent years, he has not been shy about expressing his frustration with having to pay fees to app store operators and comply with their policies.

Meta recently partnered with Amazon Web Services on a program to support startups that want to build on its Llama AI model, in an effort to make its technology essential to businesses emerging during the AI boom.

Although AI has benefitted Meta’s core advertising business, some analysts question how Zuckerberg’s quest for “superintelligence” will benefit the company.

Emarketer senior analyst Minda Smiley said she expects Meta executives to face tough questions during the company’s earnings call next week about how its superintelligence ambitions “align with the company’s broader business roadmap.”

“Its attempts to directly compete with the likes of OpenAI … are proving to be more challenging for the company while costing it billions of dollars,” Smiley said.

But as its core business continues to grow rapidly, Meta has the money to spend to build its team and “steal” from rivals, said CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino. And, at least for now, investors seem to be here for it — the company’s shares have risen around 20 per cent since the start of this year.

And if Zuckerberg succeeds with his vision, it could propel Meta far beyond a social media company.

“I think Mark’s in a manifest destiny point of his career,” said Zack Kass, an AI consultant and former OpenAI go-to-market lead. “He always wants to point to Facebook groups as being this way that he is connecting the world … And if he can build superintelligence that cures cancer, he doesn’t have to talk about Facebook groups anymore as being his like lasting legacy.”

By Clare Duffy, CNN