Meta Creates New AI Unit to Accelerate Model Development

Meta is building a new applied artificial intelligence engineering organization that will partner with the company’s Superintelligence Lab to make AI models faster, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday (March 3).

The new organization will include a team responsible for building interfaces and tooling, and another team focused on executing tasks, generating data and providing evaluations for the modeling teams, according to the report, which cited a Meta memo.

It will be led by Maher Saba, who is a vice president in Meta’s Reality Labs division, the report said.

“Building great models isn’t just about researchers and compute; it requires real-world data, feedback and evals,” Saba wrote in the memo, per the report. “This creates the flywheel that turns a strong model into a leading one. Lately, we’ve seen some excellent gains from reinforcement learning and post-training and we believe we have a real opportunity to move faster and pull ahead if we double down on these efforts.”

Meta created its Superintelligence Lab during summer 2025 to work on the company’s foundation models, product, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and the next generation of its models.

In August, it was reported that Meta was reconfiguring its AI efforts in the fourth such restructuring in six months.

Around the same time, it was reported that Meta paused hiring for AI professionals following a massive recruitment drive that saw Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally get involved the company’s AI hiring efforts and offering, in some cases, nine-figure compensation packages.

In January, it was reported that Meta planned to eliminate 10% of the jobs in another business unit, Reality Labs, as part of a larger plan to reduce the company’s focus on virtual reality products as it concentrates on other AI wearables.

Meta has made these moves at a time when it is pursuing an aggressive investment strategy in which it is committing billions of dollars to AI compute and model development. The company is part of a small group of technology giants expected to spend more than $500 billion combined on capital expenditures in 2026, largely driven by investments in data centers, chips and AI infrastructure.

The WSJ also reported Tuesday that its parent company, News Corp, has formed an AI content licensing deal with Meta that will run for at least three years and will see the tech giant pay up to $50 million a year to use the media company’s content from the United States and the United Kingdom.

Meta will use the content to train its AI models and to provide newer information about things such as current events to the users of its AI products, according to the report.

It was reported in September that Meta held talks with media companies, including News Corp, about licensing their articles for use in AI training.