Meta’s newly formed superintelligence lab has discussed making a series of changes to the company’s artificial intelligence strategy, in what would amount to a major shake-up at the social media giant.
Last week, a small group of top members of the lab, including Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta’s new chief A.I. officer, discussed abandoning the company’s most powerful open source A.I. model, called Behemoth, in favor of developing a closed model, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
For years, Meta has chosen to open source its A.I. models, which means it makes the computer code public for other developers to build on. Closed models keep their underlying code private. Meta executives have long argued it is better for the technology to be built in public so that A.I. development will move faster and be accessible to more developers.
Any move toward a closed A.I. model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won plaudits from developers for open sourcing its A.I. models and one of its top A.I. executives, Yann LeCun, had said “the platform that will win will be the open one.” This year, the Chinese A.I. company DeepSeek released an advanced A.I. chatbot thanks in part to Meta’s open source code.
Meta had finished feeding in data to improve its Behemoth model, a process known as “training,” but has delayed its release because of poor internal performance, said the people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to discuss private conversations. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the Behemoth model — which is known as a “frontier” model — stopped running new tests on it, one of the people said.
The superintelligence lab’s discussions are preliminary and no decisions have been made on potential changes, which would need sign-off from Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive. Meta could keep its open source A.I. models while prioritizing a closed model. If these scenarios happen, they would be a significant shift for the company as it tries to stay competitive in the A.I. race against rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment on the superintelligence lab’s discussions. In a podcast interview last year, Mr. Zuckerberg said, “We’re obviously very pro open source, but I haven’t committed to releasing every single thing that we do.”
Meta’s superintelligence lab is being closely watched after the company recently stumbled with A.I. technology, including internal management struggles, employee churn and product releases that fell flat. Mr. Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to create A.I. that is “superintelligent,” which means it would hypothetically exceed the powers of the human brain.
Mr. Zuckerberg has embarked on a spending spree to create the new lab, offering as much as nine-figure pay packages to hire top researchers from companies like OpenAI, Google, Apple and Anthropic. Meta also sidelined its executive who had been leading generative A.I.
In June, the company made a $14.3 billion investment in the A.I. start-up Scale AI, which was founded and led by Mr. Wang. Under the deal, Meta took a 49 percent stake in the company, and Mr. Wang and a team of top Scale employees joined Meta in leadership roles.
The company has since renamed its entire A.I. division “Meta Superintelligence Labs,” with Mr. Wang as chief A.I. officer. Within the larger A.I. division, Mr. Wang has led an exclusive team of around a dozen newly hired researchers, a handful of his deputies from Scale AI, and Nat Friedman, the former chief executive of GitHub, a software start-up.
Many members of Mr. Wang’s team reported to Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., last week for the first time, the two people with knowledge of the matter said. The group is working in an office space siloed from the rest of the company and next to Mr. Zuckerberg, the people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Wang held a question-and-answer session with Meta’s A.I. workers, who number about 2,000. In the meeting, he said the work of his small team would be private, but Meta’s entire A.I. division would now be working toward creating superintelligence, the people with knowledge of the matter said. He did not address whether A.I. models would be open or closed.
In August, at the end of the company’s next vesting period, which is when some workers are able to sell portions of their stock, some employees expect an exodus of A.I. talent who were not chosen to join Mr. Wang’s superintelligence team, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.
Eli Tan covers the technology industry for The Times from San Francisco.
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