Meta’s new AI superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

Wang, who co-founded Scale AI in 2016, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Dec 6, 2023. An us-versus-them mentality has emerged between Meta’s newly-recruited and lavishly-paid artificial intelligence team, led by Wang, and longtime lieutenants to Zuckerberg. — Shuran Huang/The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO: When Mark Zuckerberg revamped Meta’s artificial intelligence operations this year, he recruited a new leader – Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old entrepreneur – to build a team of top researchers from rivals like OpenAI and Google.

That team, called TBD Lab (for “to be determined”), was placed in a siloed space next to Zuckerberg’s office at the centre of Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by glass panels and sequoia trees. Zuckerberg wanted to separate the new AI group from the bureaucracy of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, two people with knowledge of the matter said.