Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, is building a specialized team focused on achieving AI superintelligence, according to reports from Bloomberg and The New York Times. Zuckerberg has been personally involved in recruiting efforts, engaging with potential team members, including AI researchers, infrastructure engineers, and entrepreneurs, over the past month.

The immediate objective for many AI companies is to reach artificial general intelligence (AGI), where machines possess human-level intelligence and can perform any task a human can. Superintelligence represents a further advancement, envisioning AI systems with intellectual capabilities surpassing those of any human.

Key Personnel and Investments

Zuckerberg apparently said that his company’s advertising business can finance its own AI growth even if it costs tens of billions of dollars.

The Times reports that Alexandr Wang, founder of AI startup Scale AI, has been tapped to join the new Meta team. Meta plans to invest billions in Scale AI, which provides data for training AI models. This deal will also integrate scale’s employees into Meta, tho the specific roles of these employees within the new superintelligence team remain unclear.

Meta has reportedly offered substantial compensation packages, ranging from seven to nine figures, to AI experts from companies like Google and Open AI. Some of these experts have already accepted the offers, according to The Times. Zuckerberg has emphasized that Meta’s advertising revenue can sustain its AI development, even with costs reaching tens of billions of dollars.

Motivation Behind the Initiative

According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg’s direct involvement in recruitment stems from dissatisfaction with the performance and public reception of Meta’s Llama 4 large language model. The company also postponed the release of its “Behemoth” Llama 4 model, which was intended to outperform “GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks.”