This summer, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg moved heaven and earth to recharge his company’s lagging AI division, spending billions of dollars to poach top talent across the industry. But it sounds like he’s already falling out with the man he hired to spearhead Meta’s renewed AI efforts, Alexandr Wang.
According to new reporting from the Financial Times, things are tense between the duo. Sources familiar with the matter say that Wang has told associates he finds Zuckerberg’s 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.
It’s another sign of Zuckerberg’s direction for the company coming under the microscope, after his last big gamble — on creating a virtual reality “Metaverse” — failed spectacularly. 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 and erase over $200 billion in market cap.
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’t actually build them. In June, Zuckerberg poured over $14 billion into Scale AI, and poached Wang in the process to lead Meta’s newly dubbed Superintelligence Labs. Wang is also leading a secretive “TBD” (To Be Determined) lab which works in its own building.
The cost of the hire wasn’t just monetary: Meta’s then-chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, didn’t take kindly to being forced to start reporting to Wang, and made a shock exit in November. LeCun is considered a “godfather” 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’s Superintelligence Labs.
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 “superintelligence” that equals or surpasses human capabilities. LeCun viewed LLMs as a dead end and favored building new kinds of AI models instead.
Some staff questioned Wang’s credentials to lead such an important effort, and it’s a fair point to raise because Wang’s company didn’t build AI models at all. Instead, its focus was on the data used to train them, an entirely different kettle of fish. Now, he’s expected to not just develop AI models, but the kind that would rival human intelligence.
This isn’t the first sign of flair-ups with Wang at the company. The New York Times reported earlier this month that Wang was clashing with longtime Zuckerberg lieutenant Chris Cox, who wanted to focus on using Facebook and Instagram to train Meta’s new model. Wang disagreed and argued for focusing on catching up with Google and OpenAI’s models instead.
Zuckerberg’s determination is to build these products as fast as possible, which will only heighten tensions. “If you build too slowly,” he said in an interview on the Access podcast, per the FT, ”then you are just out of position on what I think is going to be the most important technology that enables the most new product and innovation and value creation in history.”
His other big new hire, former Github CEO Nat Friedman, is in a similar position to Wang, and some in his team were frustrated after what they perceived was the rushed release of Vibes, a feed of AI-generated videos akin to OpenAI’s Sora 2 app.
The pressure isn’t going to relent anytime soon. The secretive TBD lab is aiming to release an entirely new AI model built from scratch in the first quarter next year, people familiar with the matter told FT.
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