{"id":18979,"date":"2025-07-24T16:55:15","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T16:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/18979\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T16:55:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T16:55:15","slug":"alexandr-wang-is-now-leading-metas-ai-dream-team-will-mark-zuckerbergs-big-bet-pay-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/18979\/","title":{"rendered":"Alexandr Wang is now leading Meta\u2019s AI dream team. Will Mark Zuckerberg’s big bet pay off?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the summer of 2016, Alexandr Wang was a 19-year-old building his data-labeling startup, Scale AI, in a Silicon Valley pool house with his cofounder, Lucy Guo, while the two participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator. When not working, the two founders slept on air mattresses and pondered the fledgling business\u2019s potential. Less than a decade later, the pool house project has reset expectations and plans across the tech industry\u2019s highest levels. In June, Mark Zuckerberg handed the now 28-year-old Wang the keys to Meta\u2019s entire AI operations as part of a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. As Meta\u2019s first-ever chief AI officer, Wang now leads a newly formed superintelligence team packed with AI industry superstars paid like high-priced athletes, and oversees Meta\u2019s other AI product and research teams\u2014all under the umbrella of a new organization called Meta<\/a> Superintelligence Labs.<\/p>\n

This AI dream team, and Wang\u2019s role as its captain, mark the latest chapter in a Silicon Valley narrative that\u2019s practically a clich\u00e9 by now: a new wunderkind rising in tandem with the next world-changing technology. In this case, however, rather than disrupting the old guard, Wang is leaping to action to help an established tech giant, which happens to be run by the previous generation\u2019s whiz kid. <\/p>\n

Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was worth more than $1 billion by his 23rd birthday, is going all in on AI to maintain the dominance of his 3.4-billion-user-strong social media empire. In addition to spending tens of billions of dollars a year on infrastructure to build the data centers running its AI, the Meta CEO is writing big checks to recruit the world\u2019s most sought-after AI talent. Along- side Wang, whom Zuckerberg has called \u201cthe most impressive founder of his generation,\u201d the superintelligence team includes former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; Daniel Gross, who had been CEO and cofounder of buzzy startup Safe Superintelligence; as well as researchers poached from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google<\/a>, and Apple<\/a>, with compensation packages for some rumored to be north of $100 million. Ruoming Pang, the engineer in charge of Apple\u2019s foundation models team, is reportedly pocketing a whopping $200 million over four years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote on his Threads app in July.<\/p>\n

The goal of this extraordinary hiring spree? Most pressingly, to reverse Meta\u2019s recent struggles in the grueling week-to-week contest for AI market share and mindshare, and to lock in Meta\u2019s large language models at the front of the pack. But Wang and his team of super friends have also been tasked with accomplishing something far more ambitious, and something that will be much trickier to measure with ordinary KPIs: to attain the still entirely theoretical concept of \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d leapfrogging ChatGPT-maker OpenAI\u2014and all other frontier AI competitors\u2014in the race to define the future of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n

If the word \u201csuperintelligence\u201d conjures images of omniscient science fiction machines, you\u2019re not too far off the mark.<\/p>\n

There is no agreed-upon formal definition of superintelligence, though the term typically refers to an artificial intelligence that vastly surpasses human capabilities in virtually all domains, including scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills.<\/p>\n

Superintelligence is generally perceived as going beyond artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which, though also vague, typically refers to an AI system with human-level intelligence across a wide range of work-related tasks. That is, it can reason, plan, solve problems, understand language, and learn in a generalizable way, much like a human. Estimates for achieving AGI vary widely, ranging from a few months to a decade or more; for superintelligence, the timeline ranges from a few years to never.<\/p>\n

Among Silicon Valley\u2019s leaders, the mission is spoken about with the assurance of an airplane pilot giving passengers a flight update en route to their destination.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeveloping superintelligence is coming into sight,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo obtained by Fortune, though he provided no specific estimate for the date. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for his part, wrote in a June blog post that humanity is now \u201cclose\u201d to building digital superintelligence.)<\/p>\n

Zuckerberg\u2019s memo claimed that Meta is \u201cuniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world,\u201d pointing to the computing power in its data centers versus smaller labs with fewer resources.<\/p>\n

In his July Threads post, Zuckerberg touted Meta\u2019s investments in massive, multi-gigawatt data centers with grandiose names (\u201cPrometheus\u201d and \u201cHyperion\u201d) and mind-boggling scale: One of the data centers, Zuck boasted, will have a footprint nearly as big as Manhattan. Meta will \u201cinvest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence,\u201d Zuckerberg declared. \u201cWe have the capital from our business to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s probably a handful of people in the world that you bet on,\u201d says a former Scale AI manager. Wang is one of them.<\/p>\n

Of course, a few other notable tech giants have the capital too, and they are dead set on edging Meta out. Microsoft<\/a> and Google are both deploying tens of billions in capital expenditures to build out their AI infrastructure. And OpenAI, in addition to its partnership with Microsoft, has said it intends to invest $500 billion with partners including SoftBank to build out the Stargate network of AI data centers over the next few years.<\/p>\n

In making Wang Chief AI Officer, Meta has chosen someone who is an entrepreneur, not a computer scientist. Even more notable is the fact that the man leading Meta\u2019s quest for superintelligence comes from a company that was not in the business of actually building large language models.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that Wang\u2014a competitive \u201cmathlete\u201d in high school\u2014is a cerebral slouch. He\u2019s \u201c11\/10 smart and ambitious\u201d and \u201csuperspecial,\u201d says Sarah Guo, founder of VC firm Conviction and former general partner at venture capital firm Greylock, when describing Wang. Guo (no relation to Scale AI cofounder Lucy Guo, who parted ways with Scale in 2018) got to know Scale\u2019s founders when they launched their startup from the pool house of her Portola Valley, Calif., home.<\/p>\n

Will Meta\u2019s teams of AI PhDs and computer scientists be as impressed and find in Wang the inspiration that drives them to reach the land of superintelligence? <\/p>\n

People close to Wang, including current and former Scale AI employees, investors, acquaintances, and competitors, have emphasized that Wang should not be underestimated in his ability to attract talent and lead Meta\u2019s AI organization into the future. \u201cThere\u2019s probably a handful of people in the world that you bet on\u201d to build the kind of team Zuckerberg is looking for at Meta, and Wang is on that short list, says a former Scale AI manager who recently left the company. Wang \u201cis a great recruiter, a really savvy commercial person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conviction\u2019s Guo echoes the sentiment: \u201cI think people would be mistaken to underestimate Alex and Nat,\u201d she says, referring to Wang and his Meta teammate Nat Friedman. \u201cThey are very, very smart, ambitious, technical people who are going to listen to their researchers. They are compelling recruiters with a lot of compute and have [Zuckerberg\u2019s] insane force of will behind them.\u201d An early Scale AI employee, who left in 2022, said that Wang em- bodied the startup\u2019s credo of \u201cAmbition shapes reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps that winds back to Wang\u2019s childhood as the son of immigrant parents who were nuclear physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Wang, whose first name is spelled without the second \u201ce\u201d to give it the eight characters associated with good fortune in Chinese culture, dropped out of MIT after one year to pursue the startup dream. Wang and Guo had originally planned to create tech for a doctors\u2019 concierge service, but after joining Y Combinator they saw an opportunity in data\u2014specifically in the behind-the-scenes, labor- intensive work of tagging and organizing data so that AI models can learn from it.<\/p>\n

Scale\u2019s pivot to data labeling, often considered the \u201cgrunt work\u201d that powers AI\u2019s intelligence, proved to be perfectly timed and highly valuable because of how critical data is for AI models. \u201cLucy\u2019s phone bricked from overheating because she\u2019d set up the phone with Twilio<\/a> to get a text notification every time a new request came in, and they flooded in so fast once researchers decided they wanted the data,\u201d recalls Sarah Guo.<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s relationship with Scale AI dates back to 2019, when the social media company began using Scale as a data provider for its AI efforts, and Meta was among the investors in Scale\u2019s $1 billion funding round in 2024. Zuckerberg and Wang began spending more time together beginning in April, when Zuckerberg reached out and expressed a desire to work more closely, according to a source familiar with the negotiations. <\/p>\n

The Meta CEO began inviting Wang (who had become the world\u2019s youngest self-made billionaire before turning 25) to meet with him at his houses in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, with Zuckerberg soon coming to trust Wang\u2019s opinion. Advisors say that Zuckerberg would sometimes reference Wang\u2019s views in conversations with them, The Information reported.<\/p>\n

The conversations between the two CEOs came at a time when Zuckerberg was growing frustrated with Meta\u2019s struggles keeping up with rival AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind<\/a>. Meta had succeeded in creating a family of successful open-source AI models, called Llama, but never seemed able to stay ahead of the pack for long. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind would inevitably surge past Meta with each new update.<\/p>\n

With the release of Llama 4 in April 2025, Meta\u2019s malaise became a crisis. Allegations of possibly inflated performance metrics, a rushed release, and a lack of transparency, along with indications that Meta was failing to keep pace with open-source AI rivals like China\u2019s DeepSeek, led many in the industry to proclaim Meta\u2019s latest AI model a flop. (Meta has called claims that it gamed performance metrics \u201csimply not true.\u201d)<\/p>\n

And so, even as Wang pushes for future superintelligence, he has the challenging near-term assignment of reinvigorating Meta\u2019s current LLM efforts. In the Llama large language models, Meta has a valuable asset and vast resources to draw upon. But as competition intensifies, particularly with upstart rivals from China, Wang will need to make some important strategic decisions, including whether it still makes sense to keep Llama open-source, or whether the changing competitive landscape requires that Meta keep the models\u2019 weights under lock and key.<\/p>\n

With Wang\u2019s firsthand experience building a successful business in the AI sector, the perspective he acquired as a neutral data provider serving the top LLM makers, and his business savvy, fans say he could be the missing ingredient to take Meta\u2019s AI efforts to the next level.<\/p>\n

Alex Ren, founding managing partner at Fellows Fund, says that Meta needed an entrepreneur to lead its AI organization\u2014and it found that in Wang, as well as Friedman and Gross. Meta\u2019s AI teams had previously been led by scientists and product managers. \u201cThat\u2019s wrong,\u201d says Ren, who counts several of the members of the new superintelligence team as friends. Pointing to OpenAI, and its business-oriented CEO, Sam Altman, Ren says that Meta \u201cshould really be led by founders and entrepreneurs. Alex Wang is not a researcher, he is a leader.\u201d<\/p>\n

With more than $164 billion in annual revenue, Meta knows all too well that it takes something truly unique to move the needle in its business. And in paying up for Wang and his team, Zuckerberg is betting that the ultimate value transcends any simple categories.<\/p>\n

If Wang strikes some as an unconventional choice, reckons one source close to the entrepreneur, it\u2019s because he does not fit into the typical tech-world archetypes: \u201cSilicon Valley is good at putting people into boxes. They like to say, \u2018This person is a technical person, this person is a businessperson.\u2019 Alex is truly a man of one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Few companies could justify pouring billions into speculative AI research and assembling a roster of top-tier talent armed with the latest secret recipes for model success. But Meta can\u2014and has. Whether that bet pays off is still uncertain. Still, as one current Meta AI research scientist\u2014who isn\u2019t on the new superintelligence team\u2014told Fortune, if that group makes big leaps in frontier AI over the next six months, \u201ceverything can be justified.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article appears in the August\/September 2025<\/a> issue of Fortune with the headline \u201cCan Alexandr Wang bring Meta AI supremacy?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the summer of 2016, Alexandr Wang was a 19-year-old building his data-labeling startup, Scale AI, in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,20062,20063,2455,1333,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-18979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-fortune-500","14":"tag-fortune-500-companies","15":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","16":"tag-meta","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}