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\t\t\tIllustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins \/ Futurism. Source: Dimitrios Kambouris \/ Getty Images for WSJ. Magazine Innovators Awards<\/p>\n
This summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved heaven and earth to recharge his company\u2019s lagging AI division, spending billions of dollars to poach top talent across the industry. But it sounds like he\u2019s already falling out with the man he hired to spearhead Meta\u2019s renewed AI efforts, Alexandr Wang.<\/p>\n
According to new reporting<\/a> from the Financial Times, things are tense between the duo. Sources familiar with the matter say that Wang has told associates he finds Zuckerberg\u2019s micromanagement to be suffocating. Meanwhile, some staff wonder if the 28-year-old Wang is out of his depth, lacking both the expertise and experience to lead such a colossal effort.<\/p>\n It\u2019s another sign of Zuckerberg\u2019s direction for the company coming under the microscope, after his last big gamble \u2014 on creating a virtual reality \u201cMetaverse\u201d \u2014 failed spectacularly<\/a>. Market skepticism was in full display in October, when Meta announced billions more in AI spending this year and the next, causing its stock to plunge 11 percent<\/a> and erase over $200 billion in market cap.<\/p>\n His decision to hire Wang was controversial to begin with. Wang is the founder and former CEO of the AI data annotation startup Scale AI, which provides an essential service for training AI models, but doesn\u2019t actually build them. In June, Zuckerberg poured over $14 billion into Scale AI, and poached Wang in the process to lead Meta\u2019s newly dubbed Superintelligence Labs.\u00a0Wang is also leading a secretive \u201cTBD\u201d (To Be Determined) lab which works in its own building.<\/p>\n The cost of the hire wasn\u2019t just monetary: Meta\u2019s then-chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, didn\u2019t take kindly<\/a> to being forced to start reporting to Wang, and made a shock exit in November<\/a>. LeCun is considered a \u201cgodfather\u201d of the field for his pioneering work on neural networks, and he likely felt insulted to see his research rather than product-focused AI lab being hollowed out by firings while Zuckerberg offered astronomical nine-figure contracts to bring in talent to Wang\u2019s Superintelligence Labs.<\/p>\n The new lab will double down on using large language models, the same architecture that powers AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini, in its efforts to build a \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that equals or surpasses human capabilities. LeCun viewed LLMs as a dead end and favored building new kinds of AI models instead.<\/p>\n Some staff questioned Wang\u2019s credentials to lead such an important effort, and it\u2019s a fair point to raise because Wang\u2019s company didn\u2019t build AI models at all. Instead, its focus was on the data used to train them, an entirely different kettle of fish. Now, he\u2019s expected to not just develop AI models, but the kind that would rival human intelligence.<\/p>\n