Meta announced the formation of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) on July 1, marking the social media giant's largest reorganization of AI research efforts with a $100 billion commitment toward developing artificial general intelligence. The initiative consolidates all foundation model teams, product AI groups, and Facebook AI Research (FAIR) projects under unified leadership.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined the strategic shift in an internal memo, stating that developing superintelligence has come "into sight" as AI progress accelerates. The restructuring represents Meta's most direct challenge to OpenAI and Google in the race for advanced AI systems capable of human-level reasoning across multiple domains.
The company has recruited over a dozen senior researchers from competing AI labs, including former OpenAI scientists Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao, and Hongyu Ren. Several prominent figures from Google DeepMind have also joined the initiative, though specific names remain undisclosed pending official announcements.
Leading MSL is Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, appointed as Chief AI Officer following Meta's $14.3 billion acquisition of his data annotation company. Wang will partner with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who joins to head AI products and applied research. The leadership appointments signal Meta's focus on both foundational research and practical AI applications.
Industry analysts view the move as Meta's response to increasing competition in large language models and multimodal AI systems. The consolidation eliminates previous silos between research divisions that had worked on language models, computer vision, and robotics independently.
The reorganization affects thousands of Meta employees across research facilities in Menlo Park, New York, London, and Paris. Engineering teams previously scattered across Reality Labs, Core Tech, and product divisions will now report directly to MSL leadership.
Meta's stock rose 3.2 percent following the announcement, with investors viewing the unified structure as potentially accelerating AI product development. The company plans to release details about specific research priorities and timelines in the coming weeks.
The formation of MSL positions Meta as a direct competitor to OpenAI's ongoing GPT development and Google's Gemini project, intensifying the corporate race toward artificial general intelligence.