Latest news with #Llama4
NDTV
3 hours ago
- Business
- NDTV
Names Of 44 People In Meta's Superintelligence Team Revealed, Only 2 Indians Make The Cut
Meta is aggressively poaching top AI talent, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, to build its Superintelligence Team. The team is part of Meta's ambitious plan to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence. Meta's recruitment strategy involves offering substantial compensation packages, sometimes exceeding $150 million, to attract top talent from competitors like Apple, Google, and OpenAI. Recently, a social media user shared a list of 44 employees allegedly working on Meta's AI project, claiming the list was obtained from an anonymous employee. According to the post, these employees are likely earning between $10 million and $100 million per year. Out of 44, only two Indian-origin researchers, Trapit Bansal and Hammad Syed, have been included in Meta's AI team. Notably, half of the hires are reportedly from China, with around 75% holding PhDs and 70% being researchers. The list also suggests that Meta's recruitment efforts have been successful in poaching talent from top companies, with 40% of the hires coming from OpenAI, 20% from Google's DeepMind, and 15% from Scale. See the post here: 🚨 BREAKING: Detailed list of all 44 people in Meta's Superintelligence team. — 50% from China — 75% have PhDs, 70% Researchers — 40% from OpenAI, 20% DeepMind, 15% Scale — 20% L8+ level — 75% 1st gen immigrants Each of these people are likely getting paid $10-$100M/yr. — Deedy (@deedydas) July 19, 2025 Who are the 2 Indians in the list? Trapit Bansal, an IIT Kanpur alumnus with a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specialises in meta-learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. He has worked at top AI institutions like OpenAI, Microsoft Research, Google Research, and Facebook. He was involved in developing OpenAI's O-series AI models and has collaborated with notable AI researchers like Ilya Sutskever. Hammad Syed, a recent addition to Meta, co-founded voice startup PlayAI with Mahmoud Felfel in 2021. PlayAI specialises in creating lifelike text-to-speech models and voice agents in over 30 languages. According to a Bloomberg report citing an internal memo, the entire PlayAI team is set to join Meta, further bolstering the company's AI capabilities. About Meta's Superintelligence Labs Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) is a division of Meta, announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in July 2025, aimed at advancing artificial general intelligence (AGI) to achieve "superintelligence". MSL consolidates Meta's AI efforts, including its foundation model teams, product teams, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, and a new lab focused on next-generation large language models (LLMs). The initiative reflects Meta's ambition to compete with leading AI organisations like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, following setbacks with its Llama 4 model and internal challenges like staff departures and underperforming product releases. MSL is led by Alexandr Wang, former CEO of Scale AI, who serves as Meta's Chief AI Officer. Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO and a prominent AI investor, co-leads MSL, focusing on AI products and applied research.
Atlantic
2 days ago
- Business
- Atlantic
Meta Swears This Time Is Different
Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the 'godfathers' of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world's most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab. FAIR has since made a number of significant contributions to AI research, including in the field of computer vision. Although the division was not focused on advancing Facebook's social-networking products per se, the premise seemed to be that new AI tools could eventually support the company's core businesses, perhaps by improving content moderation or image captioning. But for years, Facebook didn't develop AI as a stand-alone, consumer-facing product. Now, in the era of ChatGPT, the company lags behind. Facebook, now called Meta, trails not just OpenAI and Google but also newer firms such as Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek—all of which have launched advanced generative-AI models and chatbots over the past few years. In response, Zuckerberg's company quickly launched its own flagship model, Llama, but it has struggled relative to its competitors. In April, Meta proudly rolled out a Llama 4 model that Zuckerberg called a 'beast' —but after an experimental version of the model scored second in the world on a widely used benchmarking test, the version released to the public ranked only 32nd. In the past year, every other top AI lab has released new 'reasoning' models that, thanks to a new training paradigm, are generally much better than previous chatbots at advanced math and coding problems; Meta has yet to deliver its own. So, a dozen years after building FAIR, Meta is effectively starting over. Last month, Zuckerberg went on a new recruiting spree. He hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old ex-head of the start-up Scale, as chief AI officer to lead yet another division—dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL—and has reportedly been personally asking top AI researchers to join. The goal of this redo, Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo to employees, is 'to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.' Meta is reportedly attempting to lure top researchers by offering upwards of $100 million in compensation. (The company has contested this reporting; for comparison, LeBron James was paid less than $50 million last year.) More than a dozen researchers from rival companies, mainly OpenAI, have joined Meta's new AI lab so far. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data centers to support its pursuit of superintelligence. FAIR will still exist but within the new superintelligence team, meaning Meta has both a chief AI 'scientist' (LeCun) and a chief AI 'officer' (Wang). At the same time, MSL is cloistered off from the rest of Meta in an office space near Zuckerberg himself, according to The New York Times. When I reached out to Meta to ask about its 'superintelligence' overhaul, a spokesperson pointed me to Meta's most recent earnings call, in which Zuckerberg described 'how AI is transforming everything we do' and said that he is 'focused on building full general intelligence.' I also asked about comments made by an outgoing AI researcher at Meta: 'You'll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission,' the researcher wrote in an internal memo, reported in The Information, adding that 'to most, it's not even clear what our mission is.' The spokesperson told me, in response to the memo, 'We're excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research.' Meta's superintelligence group may well succeed. Small, well-funded teams have done so before: After a group of former OpenAI researchers peeled off to form Anthropic a few years ago, they quickly emerged as a top AI lab. Elon Musk's xAI was even later to the race, but its Grok chatbot is now one of the most technically impressive AI products around (egregious racism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding). And regardless of how far Meta has fallen behind in the AI race, the company has proved its ability to endure: Meta's stock reached an all-time high earlier this year, and it made more than $17 billion in profit from January through the end of March. Billions of people around the world use its social apps. The company's approach is also different from that of its rivals, which frequently describe generative AI in ideological, quasi-religious terms. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are all prone to writing long blog posts or giving long interviews about the future they hope to usher in, and they harbor long-standing philosophical disagreements with one another. Zuckerberg, by comparison, does not appear interested in using AI to transform the world. In his most recent earnings call, he focused on five areas AI is influencing at Meta: advertising, social-media content, online commerce, the Meta AI assistant, and devices, notably smart glasses. The grandest future he described to investors was trapped in today's digital services and conventions: 'We're all going to have an AI that we talk to throughout the day—while we're browsing content on our phones, and eventually as we're going through our days with glasses—and I think this will be one of the most important and valuable services that has ever been created.' Zuckerberg also said that AI-based updates to content recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have increased the amount of time that users spend on each platform. In this framework, superintelligence may just be a way to keep people hooked on Meta's legacy social-media apps and devices. Initially, it seemed that Meta would take a different path. When the company first entered the generative-AI race, a few months after the launch of ChatGPT, the firm bet big on 'open source' AI software, making its Llama model free for nearly anyone to access, modify, and use. Meta touted this strategy as a way to turn its AI models into an industry standard that would enable widespread innovation and eventually improve Meta's AI offerings. Because open-source software is popular among developers, Zuckerberg claimed, this strategy would help attract top AI talent. Whatever industry standards Zuckerberg was hoping to set, none have come to fruition. In January, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an AI model that was more capable than Llama despite having been developed with far fewer resources. Catching up to OpenAI may now require Meta to leave behind the company's original, bold, and legitimately distinguishing bet on 'open' AI. According to the Times, Meta has internally discussed the possibility of stopping work on its most powerful open-source model ('Behemoth') in favor of a closed model akin to those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In his memo to employees, Zuckerberg said that Meta will continue developing Llama while also exploring 'research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so.' The Meta spokesperson pointed me to a 2024 interview in which Zuckerberg explicitly said that although the firm is generally 'pro open source,' he is not committed to releasing all future Meta models in this way. While Zuckerberg figures out the path forward, he will also have to contend with the basic reality that generative AI may alienate some of his users. The company rolled back an early experiment with AI characters after human users found that the bots could easily go off the rails (one such bot, a self-proclaimed 'Black queer momma of 2' that talked about cooking fried chicken and celebrating Kwanzaa, tied itself in knots when a Washington Post columnist asked about its programming); the firm's stand-alone AI app released earlier this year also led many users to unwittingly share ostensibly private conversations to the entire platform. AI-generated media has overwhelmed Facebook and Instagram, turning these platforms into oceans of low-quality, meaningless content known as 'AI slop.' Still, with an estimated 3.4 billion daily users across its platforms, it may be impossible for Meta to fail. Zuckerberg might appear to be burning hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries and much more than that on new hardware, but it's all part of a playbook that has worked before. When Instagram and WhatsApp emerged as potential rivals, he bought them. When TikTok became dominant, Meta added a short-form-video feed to Instagram; when Elon Musk turned Twitter into a white-supremacist hub, Meta launched Threads as an alternative. Quality and innovation have not been the firm's central proposition for many, many years. Before the AI industry obsessed over scaling up its chatbots, scale was Meta's greatest and perhaps only strength: It dominated the market by spending anything to, well, dominate the market.
Mint
2 days ago
- Business
- Mint
After poaching their boss, Meta hires two more Apple AI researchers with $100 million deals
Meta has poached two more key artificial intelligence researchers from Apple, shortly after hiring their former boss, Ruoming Pang. Notably, Pang, who headed Apple's large language models team, was recruited by Meta earlier this year with a multi-year compensation package reportedly worth over $200 million. Following Pang's move, Meta has now hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter for its Superintelligence Labs team, the company's high-profile AI division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. According to Bloomberg, Lee has already joined Meta after leaving Apple in recent days, while Gunter is set to begin work soon. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken a hands-on role with Superintelligence Labs, particularly after the company's Llama 4 models struggled to match the competition. In recent months, Meta has intensified a talent war, actively poaching engineers and researchers from Apple, Google, and OpenAI. These high-profile exits come amid growing turmoil within Apple's foundation models team, which develops the technology behind the company's AI features. Reports suggest Apple's top AI executives are considering using external models to power Siri and other Apple Intelligence features, potentially relying on OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude next year. Such a shift could put the future of Apple's in-house foundation models team at risk. Meta has reportedly taken advantage of the uncertainty at Apple by making 'generous' job offers to key engineers, often offering salaries several times higher than Apple's packages for foundation engineers. In response, Apple has started giving raises to around 100 of its top engineers in an effort to retain talent. However, despite these hikes, Meta's offers remain significantly higher. Bloomberg reports that Gunter, for instance, is part of a cohort receiving multi-year packages worth over $100 million. Zuckerberg has made it clear he is willing to invest heavily to build Meta's Superintelligence Labs. 'For our superintelligence effort, I'm focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We're also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this,'he wrote in a post on Threads.
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Top Analysts Boost Meta Platforms Stock Price Target Ahead of Q2 Earnings
Top analysts from Jefferies and Canaccord Genuity boosted their price targets for Meta Platforms (META) stock ahead of the social media giant's Q2 earnings on July 30. While Jefferies' 5-star analyst Brent Thill raised the price target for META stock from $790 to $845, Canaccord Genuity's top analyst Maria Ripps increased her price target from $825 to $850. Both top-rated analysts reaffirmed a Buy rating on Meta Platforms stock, reinforcing their confidence in the company's growth potential. Elevate Your Investing Strategy: Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. These price target hikes came in even as META CEO Mark Zuckerberg faces an $8 billion shareholder lawsuit over accusations of privacy breach. Meanwhile, Wall Street expects Meta Platforms to report earnings per share (EPS) of $5.84, reflecting a 13.2% year-over-year growth. Top Jefferies Analyst Is Upbeat About Meta's Q2 Earnings Thill raised his Q2 and full-year revenue estimates for Meta Platforms by 3.1% and 2.6%, respectively. The 5-star analyst expects Meta to deliver revenue of $45.2 billion in Q2, suggesting a 15.7% year-over-year growth, which is higher than the Street's consensus estimate of 14.2%. Additionally, Thill contends that Meta Platforms' Q3 guidance seems achievable, given easier comparisons and some conservatism in the Street's estimates. Meanwhile, Thill believes that Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and the appointment of Alexandr Wang, founder of Scale AI, as the Chief AI Officer, along with the hiring of many other high-profile researchers, indicate the company's intention to streamline its AI organization and revamp leadership following the disappointing response to Llama 4. Thill argues that while Meta's capex is expected to stay elevated and put pressure on its near-term earnings, he remains confident about the long-term return on investment (ROI). Thill explained that his constructive view is supported by favorable checks on CPM (cost per mille), an increase in time spent as indicated by SensorTower, and other positive metrics. CPM indicates the cost an advertiser pays for one thousand impressions of an ad. Canaccord Views META Stock as a Top Digital Ad Pick Ripps stated that META stock remains Canaccord Genuity's top digital advertising pick. Despite its premium valuation, Ripps continues to like META stock, driven by several tailwinds. The analyst expects the company to report impressive Q2 results, backed by mid-teens year-over-year growth in ad revenue. For Q2, Ripps expects both ad revenue and total revenue to grow by about 14% year-over-year, with the modest sequential deceleration reflecting tariff-related uncertainty. The analyst expects Meta's growth to be driven by continued AI-driven improvements to content creation and ad recommendation models. Notably, the company launched a new generative ad recommendation model in Q1 2025, which is twice as efficient at improving ad performance as legacy models. Looking ahead, Ripps expects the pace of innovation to remain robust at Meta, bolstered by the acquisition of a 49% stake in Scale AI, hiring of OpenAI and Apple (AAPL) researchers, unveiling of Meta Superintelligence labs, and the acquisition of voice AI startup PlayAI. Ripps noted that while META stock is trading near all-time highs, the setup continues to look attractive, particularly as we move into 2026. Is META a Good Stock to Buy? Overall, Wall Street is bullish on Meta Platforms stock, with a Strong Buy consensus rating based on 41 Buys and four Hold recommendations. The average META stock price target of $737.86 indicates a 5% upside potential. META stock has risen 20% year-to-date.
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Mark Zuckerberg to build Manhattan-sized AI data center in Meta's superintelligence drive
In a move to solidify Meta's position in the race for artificial general intelligence (AGI), CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to build a data center nearly the size of Manhattan. The facility, described as a multi-gigawatt titan cluster, will support the company's ambitious AI initiatives, including its newly formed Superintelligence Labs division. As part of its broader AI strategy, Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the coming years, reflecting the scale and urgency of its vision. With superclusters like Prometheus set to come online in 2026 and Hyperion following, Meta aims to outpace rivals like OpenAI and Google in the development of next-generation AI models and infrastructure. Mark Zuckerberg bets big on superclusters to drive Meta's AGI ambitions Zuckerberg confirmed that Meta is building several massive AI compute clusters, each with the energy footprint of a small city. One such facility, Prometheus, will be the company's first multi-gigawatt data center, while Hyperion is designed to scale up to 5 gigawatts over time. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like An engineer reveals: One simple trick to get internet without a subscription Techno Mag Learn More Undo These efforts are intended to support the creation of superintelligent AI systems—machines capable of outperforming humans in a wide range of tasks. To fund this vision, Meta raised its 2025 capital expenditure estimate to between $64 billion and $72 billion. Zuckerberg cited the company's strong ad revenue, $165 billion last year, as a key enabler of such spending. 'We have the capital from our business to do this,' he told investors. Talent raids, new leadership, and the future of Meta's AI division In addition to infrastructure, Meta is aggressively investing in talent. The company recently formed Superintelligence Labs, a new division led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub chief Nat Friedman. Zuckerberg has reportedly led a personal effort to attract top-tier researchers, offering multimillion-dollar packages, some reaching $100 million, to secure talent from rival firms. These hires follow challenges with Meta's open-source Llama 4 model and the departure of key staff. With new AI applications like Meta AI, image-to-video ad tools, and smart glasses in development, the company is working to diversify beyond its traditional social media roots. Industry analysts suggest Meta could become the first company to bring a gigawatt-plus AI supercluster online, cementing its leadership in the global AI race. AI Masterclass for Students. Upskill Young Ones Today!– Join Now
