'Superintelligence is coming:' Read the full memo Alexandr Wang sent about Meta's massive AI restructure
Business Insider obtained the full email sent by 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, the leader of Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL, to all Meta employees who work on AI.
As the AI arms race continues, Meta has been assembling an all-star team of talent, trying to poach researchers from rival AI labs with massive offers as it races to build " personal superintelligence." Tensions have already emerged within the newly formed team between the lavishly compensated new hires and the existing researchers, some of whom have threatened to quit, Business Insider previously reported.
In the recent email sent to employees, Wang wrote that "superintelligence is coming," and to "take it seriously," Meta needs to make major changes.
That includes establishing four distinct teams that focus on research, training, products, and infrastructure.
The email also made one thing clear: most of MSL's new division heads report directly to Wang — including investor and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who was initially announced as MSL's co-leader.
It's the latest in a series of AI reorgs for Meta. In less than six months, Meta has already dissolved two major AI teams.
Wang's email warned that organizational changes can be "disruptive," but said it's necessary to increase how fast Meta can achieve superintelligence, which is when AI surpasses humans in virtually any intellectual field.
Meta declined to comment.
Meta's elite TBD Lab will explore a mysterious new model
Meta is centralizing research across two units: TBD Lab, a small team focused on training large AI models, and FAIR, Meta's long-standing AI research organization, per Wang's email.
MSL's research will be led by its new chief scientist, ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao — the only leader that Wang's memo doesn't mention reporting directly to him.
TBD will also be in charge of exploring "new directions," such as building an "omni" model. Wang's email does not provide further details about "omni." Meta didn't respond when asked by Business Insider what "omni" would entail.
An omnipotent model that could understand everything, not just text, would be in line with the multimodal focus shown by MSL's first hires, which included multiple experts in audio, video, and other mediums.
Separately, Meta had contractors work on "Project Omni" to train its chatbots to be hyper-engaging by messaging users first and remembering chats, Business Insider reported last month.
FAIR will play a more active role
The email goes on to say that FAIR will be an "innovation engine" for MSL's training runs by feeding its research directly to TBD Lab.
That's a more active role for FAIR than before. FAIR is known for publishing higher-level AI research and giving its employees a level of independence similar to academia.
In the past, there was relatively little transfer between FAIR and Meta's generative AI division, but that seems to be changing now, a FAIR employee who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation told Business Insider.
FAIR will continue to be run by Rob Fergus, and Yann LeCun will continue to be its chief scientist, "with both reporting to me," Wang said in the email.
It confirms Bloomberg reporting that LeCun would report to Wang, amid confusion over the fact that MSL technically has two chief scientists now: Lucan and Zhao.
Nat Friedman will report to Wang
Friedman, the investor and former GitHub CEO, will lead MSL's efforts to integrate AI into Meta's products, Wang's email said, offering few further details.
For years, Meta has been trying to make things like AI glasses and the Quest virtual reality headset go mainstream. Those products have garnered good reviews, but have yet to make up a meaningful portion of Meta's revenue.
When Meta internally announced the creation of MSL in June, it said that Friedman would be its co-lead. However, in the email, Wang made it clear that Friedman reports to him.
"Nat will continue to lead this work reporting to me," Wang wrote.
Meta didn't respond when asked by Business Insider if this represented a change from MSL's initial structure.
Meta's new infra team unveiled
Training and running powerful AI models requires massive amounts of specialized infrastructure — like clusters of thousands of Nvidia chips in vast data centers.
MSL's infra team will be led by Aparna Ramani, a longtime Meta engineering VP whose LinkedIn profile says she leads all of Meta's AI infrastructure.
Infrastructure has been an early focus at MSL since it announced its first hires, which included Joel Pobar, who previously led infrastructure efforts at Anthropic.
Another AI organization abolished
As part of the reorganization, Meta is dissolving the AGI Foundations team, Wang's memo said, which it created back in May.
That's the second time Meta has closed a major AI unit this year. AGI Foundations was born out of the GenAI division, which spearheaded Meta's Llama AI models but was then itself dissolved after Meta's most recent AI model, Llama 4, received a lukewarm reception.
Members of the AGI Foundations team will be spread across product, infrastructure, and FAIR, Wang's email states. Notably, TBD is not mentioned as a destination for ex-AGI Foundation members.
The restructuring raises questions about whether yet another reorg can put Meta back at the cutting edge of AI.
Meta's constant reshuffling contrasts with AI rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, which have faced fewer organizational upheavals.
Meta's reorganization plan was first reported by The Information last week.
Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organize around the key areas that will be critical to reach it — research, product and infra. We are building a world-class organization around these areas, and have brought in some incredible leaders to drive the work forward.
As we previously announced, Shengjia Zhao will direct our research efforts as Chief Scientist for MSL, Nat Friedman will lead our product effort and Rob Fergus will continue to lead FAIR. Today, I'm pleased to announce that Aparna Ramani will be moving over to MSL to lead the infrastructure necessary to support our ambitious research and product bets.
As part of this, we are dissolving the AGI Foundations organization and moving the talent from that team into the right areas. Teams whose work naturally aligns with and serves our products will move to Nat's team. Some of the researchers will move to FAIR to double down on our long term research while teams working on infra will transition into Aparna's org. Anyone who is changing teams will get an update from their manager or HRBP today, if you haven't already.
We're making three key changes to our organizational design that will help us to accelerate our efforts.
Centralizing core, fundamental research efforts in TBD Lab and FAIR.
Bolstering our product efforts with applied research that will work on product-focused models.
Establishing a unified, core infrastructure team to support our research bets.
The work will map to four teams:
TBD Lab will be a small team focused on training and scaling large models to achieve superintelligence across pre-training, reasoning, and post-training, and explore new directions such as an omni model.
FAIR will be an innovation engine for MSL and we will aim to integrate and scale many of the research ideas and projects from FAIR into the larger model runs conducted by TBD Lab. Rob will continue to lead FAIR and Yann will continue to serve as Chief Scientist for FAIR, with both reporting to me.
Products & Applied Research will bring our product-focused research efforts closer to product development. This will include teams previously working on Assistant, Voice, Media, Trust, Embodiment and Developer pillars in AI Tech. Nat will continue to lead this work reporting to me.
MSL Infra team will unify elements of Infra and MSL's infrastructure teams into one. This team will focus on accelerating AI research and production by building advanced infrastructure, optimized GPU clusters, comprehensive environments, data infrastructure, and developer tools to support state-of-the-art research, products and AI development across Meta. Aparna will lead this team reporting to me.
Ahmad and Amir will continue reporting to me focusing on strategic MSL initiatives they will share more about later.
I recognize that org changes can be disruptive, but I truly believe that taking the time to get this structure right now will allow us to reach superintelligence with more velocity over the long term. We're still working through updated rhythms and our collaboration model across teams, including when we'll come together as a full MSL org.
Thank you all for your flexibility as we adapt to this new structure. Every team in MSL plays a critical role and I'm excited to get to work with all of you.
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