Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making big change to its AI operations for which he has hired execs at $100 million-plus packages; read memo
In a new and dramatic move, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making the most aggressive move in his AI arm race. Zuckerberg is now reorganising the company’s artificial intelligence operations by restricting the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) into four distinct teams. As reported by Business Insider the company outlined the move in an internal memo from the newly appointed chief of AI Alexandr Wang. The restructuring is taking place after the aggressive hiring process in which Meta poached dozens of top AI researchers from its rivals companies. The internal email, sent by Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old head of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), outlines a dramatic restructuring aimed at accelerating Meta’s pursuit of “personal superintelligence”—AI that can outperform humans across intellectual domains.
Four pillars of Meta’s new AI strategy
In the internal memo shared with employees, Wang talks about the four specialised teams:
- TBD Lab: This is a small elite unit that will majorly focus on training and scaling large models, including a mysterious “omni” model.
- FAIR: It is a research arm of Meta and now it will take care of feeding innovations directly into model training.
- Products & Applied Research: This team will be led by ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The team will work on integrating AI into Meta’s consumer offerings.
- MSL Infra: This team will be headed by engineering veteran Aparna Ramani and it will work on building the infrastructure needed to support cutting-edge AI development.
Most of these leaders now report directly to Wang, signaling a centralization of power within MSL.
FAIR and TBD: Meta’s innovation engine
FAIR, led by Rob Fergus and chief scientist Yann LeCun will now play an important role in the development of MSL’s model. Whereas, TBD Lab will look for new directions, including the enigmatic “omni” model—believed to be a multimodal system capable of understanding text, audio, video, and more.The research wing at MSL will be headed by Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGPT, who notably does not report directly to Wang.
Read Alexandr Wang’s full memo here
Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organize around the key areas that will be critical to reach it — research, product and infra. We are building a world-class organization around these areas, and have brought in some incredible leaders to drive the work forward.
As we previously announced, Shengjia Zhao will direct our research efforts as Chief Scientist for MSL, Nat Friedman will lead our product effort and Rob Fergus will continue to lead FAIR. Today, I’m pleased to announce that Aparna Ramani will be moving over to MSL to lead the infrastructure necessary to support our ambitious research and product bets.
As part of this, we are dissolving the AGI Foundations organization and moving the talent from that team into the right areas. Teams whose work naturally aligns with and serves our products will move to Nat’s team. Some of the researchers will move to FAIR to double down on our long term research while teams working on infra will transition into Aparna’s org. Anyone who is changing teams will get an update from their manager or HRBP today, if you haven’t already.
We’re making three key changes to our organizational design that will help us to accelerate our efforts.
- Centralizing core, fundamental research efforts in TBD Lab and FAIR.
- Bolstering our product efforts with applied research that will work on product-focused models.
- Establishing a unified, core infrastructure team to support our research bets.
The work will map to four teams:
TBD Lab will be a small team focused on training and scaling large models to achieve superintelligence across pre-training, reasoning, and post-training, and explore new directions such as an omni model.
FAIR will be an innovation engine for MSL and we will aim to integrate and scale many of the research ideas and projects from FAIR into the larger model runs conducted by TBD Lab. Rob will continue to lead FAIR and Yann will continue to serve as Chief Scientist for FAIR, with both reporting to me.
Products & Applied Research will bring our product-focused research efforts closer to product development. This will include teams previously working on Assistant, Voice, Media, Trust, Embodiment and Developer pillars in AI Tech. Nat will continue to lead this work reporting to me.
MSL Infra team will unify elements of Infra and MSL’s infrastructure teams into one. This team will focus on accelerating AI research and production by building advanced infrastructure, optimized GPU clusters, comprehensive environments, data infrastructure, and developer tools to support state-of-the-art research, products and AI development across Meta. Aparna will lead this team reporting to me.
Ahmad and Amir will continue reporting to me focusing on strategic MSL initiatives they will share more about later.
I recognize that org changes can be disruptive, but I truly believe that taking the time to get this structure right now will allow us to reach superintelligence with more velocity over the long term. We’re still working through updated rhythms and our collaboration model across teams, including when we’ll come together as a full MSL org.
Thank you all for your flexibility as we adapt to this new structure. Every team in MSL plays a critical role and I’m excited to get to work with all of you.
