Meta Superintelligence Labs. Genius Move Or Desperate Gamble?

and why is Yann LeCun not mentioned in the MSL memo?

On Monday, June 30, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), details here. This will become the new home for the plethora of leading edge AI talent that he’s been vacuuming up from the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Scale AI etc.

Those new hirings have been controversial to say the least. According to an internal memo reportedly penned by Zuckerberg, details here, at least six hail directly from OpenAI, something Sam Altman is likely not to happy about. Indeed, he referenced it in this podcast with his brother Jack where he claimed that Meta had been offering million dollar signing bonuses to entice some of top researchers to join MSL. While this might just be smart move on Altman’s part to sow seeds of doubt among potential MSL recruits over what amounts of money were being offered to who, it’s likely that Zuckerberg’s compensation offers were extremely generous to say the least.

Then there’s Zuckerberg’s recent $14.5 billion “investment” in Scale AI for a 49% stake which saw co-founder Alexandr Wang jump ship to Meta, details from the Zuckerberg memo here:

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.

Of course there’s also the recent hiring of business partners Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the latter being the CEO of Safe Superintelligence, the company founded by former OpenAI research director Ilya Sutskever, details here.

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.

The “Connor” referred to here is Connor Hayes, presently VP of Product (Generative AI) at Meta. One person notable by his absence of any mention of him in the MSL memo is Yann LeCun, VP & chief AI scientist at Meta.

According to Zuckerberg’s memo, his purpose behind all these new hires is so that Meta can lead the race to develop superintelligence:

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.

So, has Zuckerberg just put together the AI dream team capable of fulfilling this goal and why does Turing award winning Yann LeCun seem to not be part of it? Let’s dig in…