Meta's New Superintelligence Lab Is Discussing Major A.I. Strategy Changes
Last week, a small group of top members of the lab, including Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta's new chief A.I. officer, discussed abandoning the company's most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
For years, Meta has chosen to open source its A.I. models, which means it makes the computer code public for other developers to build on. Closed models keep their underlying code private. Meta executives have long argued it is better for the technology to be built in public so that A.I. development will move faster and be accessible to more developers.
Any move toward a closed A.I. model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won plaudits from developers for open sourcing its A.I. models and one of its top A.I. executives, Yann LeCun, had said 'the platform that will win will be the open one.' This year, the Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek released an advanced A.I. chatbot thanks in part to Meta's open source code.
Meta had finished feeding in data to improve its Behemoth model, a process known as 'training,' but has delayed its release because of poor internal performance, said the people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to discuss private conversations. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model — which is known as a 'frontier' model — stopped running new tests on it, one of the people said.
The superintelligence lab's discussions are preliminary and no decisions have been made on potential changes, which would need sign-off from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive. Meta could keep its open source A.I. models while prioritizing a closed model. If these scenarios happen, they would be a significant shift for the company as it tries to stay competitive in the A.I. race against rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
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