Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

Summary

When Mark Zuckerberg revamped Meta’s artificial intelligence operations this year, he recruited a new leader — Alexandr Wang, a 28-year-old entrepreneur — to build a team of top researchers from rivals like OpenAI and Google.That team, called TBD Lab (for “to be determined”), was placed in a siloed space next to Mr. Zuckerberg’s office at the center of Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by glass panels and sequoia trees. Mr. Zuckerberg wanted to separate the new A.I. group from the bureaucracy of the company, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, two people with knowledge of the matter said.Five months later, that divide has become more than physical.In meetings this fall, Mr. Wang has privately told people that he disagreed with some of Mr. Zuckerberg’s longtime lieutenants, including Chris Cox, the chief product officer, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, the people briefed on the conversations said.In one case, Mr. Cox and Mr. Bosworth wanted Mr. Wang’s team to concentrate on using Instagram and Facebook data to help train Meta’s new foundational A.I. model — known as a “frontier” model — to improve the company’s social media feeds and advertising business, they said. But Mr. Wang, who is developing the model, pushed back. He argued that the goal should be to catch up to rival A.I. models from OpenAI and Google before focusing on products, the people said.The debate was emblematic of an us-versus-them mentality that has emerged between Meta’s new A.I. team and other executives, according to interviews with half a dozen current and former employees of the A.I. business. TBD Lab’s researchers have come to view many Meta executives as interested only in improving the social media business, while the lab’s ambition is to create a godlike A.I. superintelligence, three of them said.To pursue TBD Lab’s aim, Meta is pushing other departments to the sidelines. Mr. Bosworth was recently asked to slash $2 billion off next year’s proposed b...