In a high-stakes move to dominate the artificial intelligence race, Meta Platforms made a massive $14.8 billion investment in June this year to acquire a 49% stake in the AI startup Scale AI. The deal installed Scale AI's 28-year-old founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, as the leader of Meta's new "superintelligence" lab, positioning him as the public face of Mark Zuckerberg's ambitious AI reboot.
The Multi-Billion Dollar Gamble and Mounting Tensions
To secure top AI talent, including Wang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly backed his new hires with nine-figure compensation packages, sparking a fierce poaching war across Silicon Valley. However, this expensive bet is now showing signs of strain. According to a report in the Financial Times, Alexandr Wang has privately expressed frustration, describing Zuckerberg's hands-on, micromanagement approach to the company's AI push as "suffocating."
Wang is said to have complained to associates that the 41-year-old Zuckerberg's tight control is stifling progress and innovation. The report indicates that these tensions have been simmering for some time, with cracks beginning to emerge at the executive level. Internally, some Meta staff have raised questions about Wang's readiness for the role, citing his lack of experience managing large corporate teams and his background in AI data services rather than core AI research.
Strategic Clash: Open vs. Closed AI Development
The friction extends beyond management styles to a fundamental philosophical divide. Wang's superintelligence team is advocating for Meta's next major AI model to be a "closed" system, where the underlying technology is kept secret. This marks a dramatic departure from Meta's longstanding open-source philosophy, which has involved releasing its models for the broader developer community to use and build upon.
This strategic shift has caused unease among Meta's old guard, who are resistant to moving away from the open-source approach. As part of this new direction, the leadership has chosen to abandon the previous frontier model, codenamed "Behemoth," whose release was delayed last spring after underwhelming performance tests.
Reorganization and High-Profile Departures
Meta's AI division is undergoing a significant restructuring, splitting into four key groups focused on research, superintelligence development, products, and infrastructure. As this new vision solidifies under Wang and Zuckerberg, it has triggered a wave of high-level exits.
In recent weeks, Meta's longtime chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, was poached by arch-rival Apple. Chief Revenue Officer John Hegeman also announced his departure to launch a startup. Perhaps most notably, chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun is leaving to start a new AI initiative. LeCun was reportedly unhappy about having to report to Wang, and his longer-term research projects were adversely affected by recent budget cuts.
The massive investment and high-profile hiring of Alexandr Wang were meant to catapult Meta to the forefront of artificial intelligence. However, the emerging internal conflicts, strategic disagreements, and loss of key personnel suggest that integrating this $14.8 billion gamble is proving to be a complex and challenging endeavor for the social media giant.
