Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly recruiting a team to build a ‘superintelligence’

Mark Zuckerberg talks about the Orion AR glasses during the Meta Connect conference Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez) (Godofredo A. Vásquez/AP)

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally assembling a team to achieve a “superintelligence,” machines that are capable of surpassing human capabilities, according to a Bloomberg report.

Zuckerberg is reportedly so frustrated with Meta’s efforts in the artificial intelligence space that he has taken it upon himself to meet with experts in the field at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California. Meta and Zuckerberg did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Meta has created AI tools that are woven into Facebook, WhatsApp and other Meta-owned apps, as well as its Ray-Ban glasses and chatbots. But the extremely competitive AI landscape continues to be led by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, and Meta’s Llama AI model has faced some recent setbacks.

Zuckerberg plans to hire about 50 people and has shifted the layout of the company’s Menlo Park headquarters to put the new AI team near his office, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing people that asked to remain anonymous. Zuckerberg has personally taken on this task because he’s frustrated with the progress of Llama 4, Meta’s latest large language model, according to Bloomberg.

The New York Times, which separately confirmed many details of the report, also said that Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old founder and CEO of startup Scale AI, is part of the project with Meta mulling a billions in investment in his company.

Zuckerberg has reportedly told people that the initiative would be funded by Meta’s massive advertising business. It’s unclear how the new team would work with Meta’s existing AI team, Bloomberg said.

Over the past few years, Zuckerberg has pushed increasingly further into repositioning Meta into an AI powerhouse with mixed success. His intensity in the area has sharpened following the leaps in advancement from OpenAI, a rival that raised tens of billions of dollars in funding.

Zuckerberg’s superintelligence goal is extremely lofty. Before AI can achieve capabilities that outmatch humans’ brains, the technology first needs to become capable of accomplishing anything a human can do – a so-called artificial general intelligence. AI researchers debate how close we are to that AGI goal, with some saying we’re years away and other saying we’re nowhere close and we have no path to achieving it.

Nevertheless, the AI race is as competitive as any tech battle in recent memory. Meta is facing off with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet, as well as a host of other major upstarts with serious funding, including Elon Musk’s xAI and Anthropic. Apple has gotten a slow start but announced some of its own AI developments this week.

Many tech leaders like Zuckerberg believe AI represents an existential threat to their businesses. Meta has been trying to differentiate itself with Llama by making it open source, a free-to-use AI model that seeks to become the basis for the majority of the world’s AI (think Android for artificial intelligence).

Google believes AI poses a significant threat to its search business: If people can just ask an AI model for the answer, why search for anything? Apple understands that AI may ultimately make apps moot, potentially undermining its smartphone dominance. And OpenAI may have gotten a massive head start with ChatGPT, but competitors are quickly catching up.