Meet TBD Lab, Meta's Superintelligence SWAT Team
Earlier this summer, the company placed all of its AI efforts under a new umbrella group, Meta Superintelligence Labs. Charged with a mission to 'bring personal superintelligence to everyone,' in the words of Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, MSL is overseen by Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined the company as part of a $14 billion deal for a stake in his former startup, Scale AI.
At the forefront of the push to build a computer mind smarter than any human's is a team dubbed TBD Lab, which houses many of the researchers the company has lured away from rival labs, in some cases with pay packages of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
TBD Lab, as in 'to be determined,' is spearheading work on the newest version of Llama, the company's large language model, according to people familiar with the matter.
Last week, Wang sent a memo to employees that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal. Wang wrote that TBD Lab would be working alongside Meta's other AI teams on a variety of projects, including coming model releases, the extension of models' reasoning capabilities and development of AI agents.
'Already in the past month, I've seen meaningful progress in each of these collaborations,' he wrote in the memo. 'This enables us to be more technically ambitious, parallelize across several separate efforts and ultimately achieve frontier results more quickly.'
The new Llama project is being led by Jack Rae, a hire to TBD Lab from Alphabet's Google. Members of Meta's existing Llama team and TBD Lab are working together on it, according to people familiar with the matter. The new model doesn't yet have an official name, but internally has been nicknamed Llama 4.5 by some and Llama 4.X by others.
Zuckerberg has described superintelligence as a revolutionary technology that 'will improve all our existing systems and enable the creation and discovery of new things that aren't imaginable today.'
To fuel its ambitions, Meta has been hiring aggressively from its rivals, offering researchers hundreds of millions of dollars and in at least two cases $1 billion pay packages over several years. The company has to date poached at least 18 researchers from OpenAI and a number from Google, including two recent additions, Tong He and Yuanzhong Xu, according to people familiar with the matter.
Nine people from one of Meta's internal infrastructure teams were moved to the superintelligence unit after some of them got job offers from Thinking Machines Lab, a startup run by the former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, according to people familiar with the matter.
Dave Arnold, a Meta spokesman, said the company had already been planning to move those people to TBD Lab and adjust their compensation regardless of any recruitment offers they might have received.
Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
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