one year on
Zuckerberg announces Meta Superintelligence Labs
An internal memo confirms the reorganization: Alexandr Wang arrives as chief AI officer, Nat Friedman co-leads, and Meta says it intends to build 'personal superintelligence for everyone.'
Mark Zuckerberg tells Meta employees the company is consolidating its AI efforts under a new banner: Meta Superintelligence Labs.
The memo, first reported this morning, formalizes weeks of the most aggressive talent raid the field has seen. Alexandr Wang — whose Scale AI took a $14.3 billion investment from Meta earlier this month — joins as chief AI officer. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman will co-lead, focused on products and applied research. The memo names a roster of new hires poached from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind.
Zuckerberg writes that the development of superintelligence is “coming into sight” and that Meta intends to pursue it fully — with compensation packages that, by multiple reports, reach into the hundreds of millions for individual researchers.
The reaction across the industry is a mix of disbelief at the numbers and quiet recalculation of what a frontier researcher is worth. At OpenAI, chief research officer Mark Chen has already told staff it feels like “someone has broken into our home.”
The record
The going rate for a frontier researcher is now being compared, unfavorably for everyone else, to professional athlete contracts — with reports of nine-figure packages dangled at OpenAI staff.
Has spent the week telling employees and podcast hosts that missionaries will beat mercenaries, after claiming Meta offered $100M signing bonuses to his researchers.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The poaching spree worked, then curdled: MSL shipped little publicly in its first year while reorganizing repeatedly, several marquee hires departed or renegotiated, and 'personal superintelligence' became the label for Meta's late-2025 strategy pivot. The lasting effect was market-wide — frontier researcher compensation never came back down.