Meta’s Zuckerberg aiming to dominate AI race with recruiting push for new ‘superintelligence’ team: report

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a team of experts to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can meet or exceed human capabilities.

Bloomberg News reported Zuckerberg is looking to build a superintelligence team and is recruiting from a group of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers and engineers who he has been holding a series of meetings with.

Zuckerberg believes that Meta is positioned to outpace other tech companies in the race for AGI and has prioritized the recruitment of this team, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the Meta CEO’s plans. 

Zuckerberg plans to hire about 50 people for the new superintelligence team and will personally recruit most of the members, according to the report, which added that Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is expected to join Meta’s AGI team once the tech giant’s multibillion-dollar investment in the startup is complete.

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Bloomberg reported that the recruitment push stems in part from Zuckerberg’s frustration with the performance of Meta’s most recent large language model, Llama 4.

Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Meta is investing up to $65 billion towards AI in 2025, including the construction of a massive data center, and said at the time that “Llama 4 will become the leading state of the art model.”

Meta is working on a new flagship AI model called “Behemoth” – though it delayed its release last month due to concerns about whether its improvements on prior models are as significant as the company has indicated and justify a public release, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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The Journal reported that the launch of Behemoth had been pushed from April to June, before the most recent postponement pushed it back to the fall or later. 

Meta had previously indicated Behemoth was outperforming similar models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic – though sources told the outlet that its performance has been hampered due to challenges in training the AI model.

Meta was viewed as lagging behind tech rivals Microsoft and Google as well as OpenAI in the development of AI, but its spending push has helped the parent company of Facebook and Instagram catch up.

Other tech firms, including OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, are also racing to develop AGI and have pursued additional funding for those efforts.

Reuters contributed to this report.