Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta Superintelligence Labs on June 30, 2025, naming Alexandr Wang as Chief AI Officer and Nat Friedman as a partner, while Meta hired 11 engineers from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI that month in an aggressive talent acquisition push.
The new division signals Meta’s commitment to competing at the frontier of AI development, positioning the company to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the race toward artificial general intelligence. Meta’s willingness to acquire top-tier talent at premium valuations reflects the raw value placed on expertise in the AI arms race.
Alexandr Wang previously led Scale AI, the data labeling and AI infrastructure company valued at $29 billion, bringing deep experience in building the data pipelines that power modern AI systems. Nat Friedman’s background includes leading GitHub during its AI Copilot development, adding product expertise to Meta’s research-heavy AI efforts.
The talent acquisitions represent Meta’s strategy of “acqui-hiring” entire teams from competitors—purchasing highly valued companies purely for intellectual property and talent rather than traditional business metrics. Industry observers note this approach as atypical for corporate M&A but increasingly common in AI where human expertise remains the primary bottleneck.
Meta’s ambition extends beyond incremental model improvements to pursuing what the company internally calls “artificial superintelligence,” though what exactly constitutes success remains subject to debate within the organization.
Source: TS2 Technology