Key takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s memo on Meta’s new ‘superintelligence’ AI effort and big hires

AI·Fortune IntelligenceKey takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s memo on Meta’s new ‘superintelligence’ AI effort and big hiresBY Jeremy KahnBY Fortune IntelligenceBY Jeremy KahnEditor, AIJeremy KahnEditor, AIJeremy Kahn is the AI editor at Fortune, spearheading the publication's coverage of artificial intelligence

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SEE FULL BIOMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he is restructuring the company's AI efforts around a new "Superintelligence" drive and revealed a clutch of key hires from rival AI labs as he tries to catapult Meta into a leadership position in the development of the most capable AI systems

Chris Unger—Zuffa LLCMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major overhaul of Meta’s AI efforts in a memo to staff on Monday, including a clutch of significant hires from rival AI companies

The restructuring comes after Meta has struggled in recent months to stay at the cutting edge of AI

Zuckerberg’s announcement signals a major strategic shift and aggressive investment in AI, with the CEO reportedly billions of dollars to secure key AI talent

Here are key takeaways from Zuckerberg’s memo and background on the rationale behind Meta’s moves: Creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL):Meta is consolidating all its efforts that involve building large AI models—including its teams working on its Llama models, duct teams, its Fundamental AI Re (FAIR) team, as well as a brand new unit focused on the next generation of cutting-edge AI—under a new division, MSL

MSL is being co-led by ex-Scale CEO and cofounder Alexandr Wang, who is becoming Meta’s “Chief AI Officer” and ex-GitHub CEO and AI investor Nat Friedman

Strategic Goal:The explicit aim is to build “personal superintelligence for everyone,” Zuckerberg said in the memo

Superintelligence would be AI that can perform beyond human level at most cognitive tasks

Aggressive Talent Acquisition:Meta is poaching top AI talent from rivals OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic

To do so, he is offering unprecedented signing bonuses—up to $100 million, according to s made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

In his memo, Zuckerberg announced the hiring of 11 well-respected AI reers from these other AI labs

Meta also invested $14. 3 billion into Scale AI as part of the deal to bring Wang to Meta and reportedly invested billions into Friedman’s AI-focused venture capital firm to secure his move to Meta

Failed Acquisition Attempts:The hiring spree s rebuffed attempts to acquire key AI startups, including former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s company Safe Superintelligence and Perplexity AI

Llama Struggles and Competitive Pressure:Meta’s Llama AI model family, called Llama 4, has underperformed expectations

The company faced criticism that it published misleading benchmark figures for Llama 4, designed to make the models appear more competitive than they actually are

The release of Llama 4 Behemoth, the largest—and, according to Meta, the most powerful—model it has duced, has repeatedly been delayed

Meta has not yet debuted models with “reasoning” capabilities, losing ground to rivals such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Alibaba’s Qwen

This has led to internal debate Meta’s AI direction and increased urgency to revitalize its AI portfolio

Retention and Reputation Challenges:Meta has suffered from the loss of key Llama reers to competitors, further increasing the need to attract and retain world-class AI talent

What s is the full-text as Zuckerberg’s memo, which was obtained by Fortune reporter Sharon Goldman: As the pace of AI gress accelerates, 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 some details 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, duct, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on 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 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 ducts and applied re

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 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 Re Ji Lin — helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, 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 lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2

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 nical 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

Previously led synthetic data at OpenAI

I’m excited the gress we have planned for Llama 4

We’re committed to continuing to build out these models

In parallel, we’re going to start re 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 mising 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 der superintelligence to the world

We have a strong that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs

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 apach to model development will set us up to der on the mise 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. *** For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft

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