Mark Zuckerberg is burning billions to chase the holy grail of AI

Companies in the AI race are barreling toward a new goalpost: so-called superintelligence, or an AI model that can surpass human intelligence.

The terminology here can get a bit dizzying. Top AI companies had already been trying to build what’s long been called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), or AI that they claim will be as smart as humans. Depending on who you talk to, superintelligence might just be a flashy marketing term meant to draw even more venture capital — or it might be the obvious next step in the development of AI models that some believe are already as intelligent as humans.

Meta, in particular, has branded its AI department around the goal of superintelligence through its new “Superintelligence Labs.” Over the past few months, Mark Zuckerberg has escalated the industry’s talent war, reportedly offering pay packages of up to $1 billion dollars to recruit Silicon Valley’s top AI engineers.

Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram recently spoke with Riley Griffin, tech reporter at Bloomberg, about why Meta is gunning so hard for top AI talent right now and what the company hopes to build with these top technologists.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How new is Meta’s new superintelligence lab? What is it, and what are they trying to do with it?

The superintelligence lab is incredibly new, and the story of Meta’s superintelligence lab is at its core a story of competition.

So, you’ve got Mark Zuckerberg, a famously competitive CEO, and this past spring, we learned through our reporting that he’d begun to feel quite acutely that Meta was falling behind in this all-consuming race for AI. Meta had just released the latest version of its large language model – they call it Llama. This is a system meant to rival open AI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. But when the rollout landed, it fell flat. And it fell flat internally, according to our sources. It had just become clear that Meta was not leading the pack among these AI companies.

Listeners may think of Meta as the parent company of Facebook, or Instagram, or WhatsApp, these popular apps that have billions of users. But Meta is increasingly seeing itself as an AI company, too. And it wasn’t leading there. And so Zuckerberg, seeing, feeling that he was falling behind in this race, immediately sprung into action. From his homes in Tahoe and Silicon Valley, he started personally recruiting, and he was basically quietly building this new secretive team that we now know is Meta Superintelligence Labs.

What is this super secretive team going to do? I thought Meta was all about the “metaverse,” and that’s why they changed their name to Meta. It sounds like they should have changed their name to AI.

It’s a really good point. When I speak with folks on Wall Street, the metaverse is always the pain point. It is something that still bleeds cash. It’s not a big revenue driver. It hasn’t proved itself to be the dream that Mark Zuckerberg once painted.

Meta’s AI ambitions are a bit of a different beast. Back in the days where it was still called Facebook, they were in the AI game. They brought on this guy named Yann LeCun, a big, award-winning thinker on [AI]. If you were watching that at the time, you might’ve thought Meta was really well-positioned to be the AI leader.

But when OpenAI came out with ChatGPT, it blew everyone out of the water, including AI researchers at Meta who I’ve spoken with. They’d been building their own large language models, but the approach was still rather academic. It wasn’t packaged in a consumer product in the way OpenAI so successfully executed on ChatGPT. So, I think that’s when the race began, but it really kicked into gear this April with what felt to many internally at Meta as a flop with its latest release of Llama.

And what exactly has Meta done in this space so far? Nothing, it sounds like?

Right now, we’re seeing a talent war. We’re seeing Meta create a new organizational structure for its AI talent. This is a multi-billion-dollar effort, and Meta has the cash to deploy.

The perspective of company leadership is that they’re looking to make a big bet and plug that talent gap. They believe there’s only a small talent pool that can best make use of that spend, to put together these competitive models. Many are focused on reasoning, and that means they’re specialists who can help build models that think step by step, as opposed to in this probabilistic approach where they’re predicting the next word in the sentence.

A lot of chatbots right now, they look like they understand what you’re saying when you type in a question, but really they’re just predicting. They’ve taken these massive amounts of data, and they’re able to predict the next word in the sentence. And what Meta, what OpenAI, want to do is give them the capacity to think, to reason for themselves. So, if you’re going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to win the AI race, what’s a couple billion on the talent that can steer the ship? That’s the rationale coming from inside the company.

But, of course, there’s pushback. One thing I’ve heard from folks who have left Meta over the years is that if you are a PhD type who got into this really complicated question of AI reasoning and superintelligence, you weren’t necessarily inspired when Meta announced that they were creating AI chatbots that sounded like Snoop Dogg. So, there has been skepticism of Mark Zuckerberg as a leader. He’s someone who really wants to bring AI into the hands of individuals.

I think it’s too early to tell whether or not it’s working. What has been successful is Mark’s efforts to court some of the biggest names out there. They are taking away top talent from competitors. But we also know there are people who have turned down Mark Zuckerberg’s sports-team-level compensation packages.

I will say that pushback isn’t coming from Wall Street. Meta’s stock is up nearly 30 percent this year to date. Clearly, there’s excitement from the investor community.

So, it sounds like Meta is restructuring itself or creating altogether new structures, to play the long game on superintelligence. What does it look like in the rest of the industry right now?

Everybody — I mean everybody — has had to respond to Mark Zuckerberg’s crazed hiring push. His efforts have set a new bar for compensation across the industry. We’ve seen other companies like OpenAI have to make offers to their own employees that are much higher.

You’re even seeing that in the language, the public posturing from CEOs. OpenAI has said that they’re going to spend trillions on the AI race. Other companies are being quite loud about the money they’re going to throw. But we’re talking about the biggest players here — we’re not talking about the upstarts that have just gotten some venture cash and have no revenue. Meta, Google, even OpenAI are in a different position because they have cash to burn.