Meta officially has someone new at the helm of its superintelligence efforts.
Former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang has become the Chief AI Officer at Meta. Wang, 28, had founded Scale AI which created data for AI applications for companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta had earlier purchased a large stake in Scale AI for $14 billion.
“I’m excited to be the Chief AI Officer of @Meta, working alongside @natfriedman, and thrilled to be accompanied by an incredible group of people joining on the same day. Towards superintelligence,” Alexandr Wang posted on X.
In a memo sent to Meta employees, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Wang “one of the most impressive founders of his generation”. “As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way. Today I want to share some details about how we’re organizing our AI efforts to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone,” Zuckerberg said.
“We’re going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models. Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to serve as our Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry,” Zuckerberg added.
Wang also shared a list of people who’d joined Meta along with him, including many top researchers from OpenAI, and some from Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I’m excited to share as well:
• Trapit Bansal — pioneered RL on chain of thought and co-creator of o-series models at OpenAl.
• Shuchao Bi — co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4-mini. Previously led multimodal post-training at OpenAl.
• Huiwen Chang — co-creator of GPT-4o’s image generation, and previously invented MaskGIT and Muse text-to-image architectures at Google Research
• Ji Lin — helped build o3/o4-mini, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, 4o-imagegen, and Operator reasoning stack.
• Joel Pobar — inference at Anthropic. Previously at Meta for 11 years on HHVM, Hack, Flow, Redex, performance tooling, and machine learning.
• Jack Rae — pre-training tech lead for Gemini and reasoning for Gemini 2.5. Led Gopher and Chinchilla early LLM efforts at DeepMind.
• Hongyu Ren — co-creator of GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1-mini, o3-mini, o3 and o4-mini. Previously leading a group for post-training at OpenAI.
• Johan Schalkwyk — former Google Fellow, early contributor to Sesame, and technical lead for Maya.
• Pei Sun — post-training, coding, and reasoning for Gemini at Google Deepmind. Previously created the last two generations of Waymo’s perception models.
• Jiahui Yu — co-creator of o3, o4-mini, GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o. Previously led the perception team at OpenAl, and co-led multimodal at Gemini.
• Shengjia Zhao — co-creator of ChatGPT, GPT-4, all mini models, 4.1 and o3. Previously led synthetic data at OpenAI.
It’s a formidable team. OpenAI claims that Meta had lured its researchers away with joining bonuses of as much as $100 million, but Meta has internally said that number isn’t accurate. But whatever the number is, Meta has indicated it is willing to spend billions of dollars to race to superintelligence. And while thus far OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and SSI were the only companies that seemed to be seriously pursuing superintelligence, Meta too has now thrown its hat into the ring in a big way.