Zuckerberg Personally Recruiting Experts for Meta’s AGI Effort

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly taking a hands-on approach to expanding the company’s AGI team.

This effort is born out of Zuckerberg’s frustration with the tech giant’s limitations in artificial intelligence (AI), Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (June 10), citing sources familiar with the matter.

According to the report, the CEO is recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who have met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto in recent weeks, with the aim of forming what Meta calls a “superintelligence” group.

The sources told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg’s goal is to turn Meta into a leader in the field of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or machines that can perform tasks at the same level as humans. Once Meta reaches that point, it could incorporate AGI into everything from its social media platforms to products like its AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses, the report said.

PYMNTS has contacted Meta for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.

Zuckerberg plans to hire around 50 people for the new team, including a new head of AI research, the report added. While Zuckerberg has been clear about making AI a priority for Meta, sources say he has recently gone into “founder mode,” with an increasingly hands-on approach to management.

The effort is happening as the company is also — per an earlier Bloomberg report — planning a multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, which provides data labeling services to help businesses train machine learning models.

Writing about AGI earlier this year, PYMNTS noted that the realization of that goal would have major implications for business.

For instance, one AI system can analyze market trends while at the same time redesigning the supply chain to respond to those changes, that report argued.

The technology could handle customer service while also using those interactions to inform product development. It could manage operations while coming up with innovative solutions to efficiency issues. It can make strategic decisions by synthesizing information from multiple industries and domains, something that requires advanced general reasoning.

“However, the challenges are significant as well,” the report added. “The development of AGI would necessitate major economic and social changes. Industries could be transformed overnight. Jobs would be created and eliminated at unprecedented rates. Companies would need to completely rethink their organizational structures and business models.”