WASHINGTON – Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking matters into his own hands as he grows increasingly frustrated over the company’s lag in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.
The international media reported that Zuckerberg has decided to spend billions of dollars to build a new elite team focused on developing superintelligent AI systems that can surpass human capabilities.
Zuckerberg is personally assembling a 50-member team of top AI experts and has chosen to relocate the AI operations from Meta’s headquarters to an office closer to his home in California.
The move follows his dissatisfaction with the progress of Meta’s latest large language model, LLaMA 4.
Despite launching various AI tools across Facebook, WhatsApp, and other apps, Meta continues to trail behind ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, while its own AI models have faced multiple challenges in recent months.
28-year-old Alexander Wang, founder of Scale AI, would be part of this high-stakes project, which is set to be funded through Meta’s advertising revenue.
It remained unclear how the new team will collaborate with Meta’s existing AI division. Over recent years, Meta has made various efforts to become an AI powerhouse, with mixed results. Now it faces stiff competition from tech giants like Google’s parent company Alphabet, OpenAI, and a growing number of AI startups.
Like other tech leaders, Zuckerberg views AI as both an opportunity and a threat to his business. Meta’s decision to release LLaMA as an open-source AI model was a strategic move to differentiate itself from competitors. Meanwhile, companies like Google see AI as a potential risk to their core business, especially as users might prefer AI-generated answers over traditional search results.
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