Meta is forming an AI Superintelligence Team comprised of around 50 engineers, with Mark Zuckerberg personally overseeing recruitment. Zuckerberg has reportedly been discussing potential recruits with other senior leaders from the company in a WhatsApp group chat dubbed “Recruiting Party.”
He's also been inviting AI researchers and infrastructure engineers to his homes in California over the past month to invite them to join his team. Bloomberg shared that Zuckerberg decided to oversee recruitment himself due to his frustration over the public's response to its Llama 4 model, which was criticized as overpromised and underdelivered.
And apparently the one-on-one recruitment and extra effort is necessary, as Meta has reportedly been losing AI talent to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, despite offering compensation packages exceeding $2M (with one offer rumored to have been worth over $10M).
The other part of Zuckerberg's master plan is the company's upcoming $15B investment in Scale AI and the recruitment of its founder Alexandr Wang, who will take a senior position at Meta.
Meta's goal is to outpace competitors in achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is the theoretical notion that machines can perform better than humans at many tasks. Zuckerberg says that Meta's advantage is its advertising business, which can subsidize its AI business, unlike competitors which have to raise capital.
Currently Meta is off to an embarrassing start with its AI efforts…
Meta is taking heat for its standalone AI chatbot app publishing users' conversations to a public “discover” feed, including very personal information about their romantic lives, work problems, and even sexual fantasies. One conversation even included a person's phone number and e-mail address when they asked for help drafting a letter to a judge in a child custody case.
Meta says that AI chats are set to private by default and that users have to actively tap the share or publish buttons before the conversations show up on the app's discover feed, however, the button doesn't explicitly tell users where their conversations will be posted, which confused many users.
Does it really take a “superintelligence team” to tell Mark Zuckerberg that publicly sharing people's private conversations with AI chatbots is a bad idea?