Artificial intelligence division of Meta undergoes restructuring; question remains about the consequences.
Meta, the tech giant behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has announced a significant restructuring of its AI division, carving it into four separate teams under the new banner of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This marks the fourth overhaul of Meta's AI operations in less than six months.
The new division is led by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who co-leads MSL alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The pair oversee the daily operations of the team, with Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner, playing a key role in Meta's AI efforts but not in the day-to-day leadership of the Superintelligence Labs.
One of the teams under MSL is TBD Lab, which focuses on training and scaling Meta's largest models to achieve superintelligence. TBD Lab is exploring an "omni" model, potentially a multimodal system handling text, visual, audio, and other data types.
Another team within MSL is FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), Meta's long-standing AI research arm led by Director of AI Research Rob Fergus and Chief Scientist Yann LeCun. TBD Lab and FAIR will work together on research, with FAIR serving as an "innovation engine" for MSL.
The Products and Applied Research team is responsible for weaving Meta's AI research into consumer products, while the MSL Infrastructure (Infra) team handles the infrastructure needed to power Meta's AI research and development.
The restructure comes amidst rising scrutiny in the AI industry, with experts warning that Big Tech's rampant spending may not be sustainable for much longer. In response, Meta has placed a hard stop on all hiring, including within MSL. This hiring freeze was announced by the Wall Street Journal around the same time as the restructure.
The freeze is not primarily about saving money, but rather pausing the game of musical chairs to stabilize reporting lines and prove the new org design works. Meta has also reportedly scrapped its old frontier model, Behemoth, and started anew, potentially making this new model "closed."
The company has also been poaching over 50 AI researchers and engineers in recent months, including from OpenAI, Google, Apple, xAI, Anthropic, and Thinking Machines Lab. Several of these new researchers received nine-figure pay packages to join Meta.
However, the shift has reportedly intensified tensions between the newcomers and the old guard. Meta is dissolving AGI Foundations, the team that developed Llama language models, and its members will be dispersed across MSL's product, infrastructure, and FAIR divisions.
Meta's capital expenditures could be as much as $72 billion in 2025, with the bulk going toward building new data centers and hiring researchers. Despite the hiring freeze, Meta remains committed to its superintelligence ambitions, as demonstrated by the restructure and the high-profile appointments of Wang and Friedman.
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