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- Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang has a pitch for “hotshot” AI scientists.
- His pitch: Meta’s compute power, talent, team size, and boldness.
- “I think Meta has everything necessary to achieve superintelligence,” Wang said on TBPN.
If you’re a “hotshot” AI scientist, Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang just made his latest pitch to woo you to his team.
Tech talk show TBPN asked Wang on Wednesday about how he would recruit for the team he’s building, Meta Superintelligence Labs.
“I think Meta has everything necessary to achieve superintelligence,” Wang said on TBPN. “There are no obstacles.”
His pitch boils down to four things: Meta’s compute power, talent, team size, and boldness.
First off, Wang said, Meta has plenty of compute power to train AI models.
Meta tweaked its capital expenditure guidance for the year as the AI race intensifies. The tech giant said in its most recent quarterly earnings that it adjusted the bottom of its capex range to $66 million, up from $64 million, and kept the top of the range at $72 million.
“We have the business model to support building literally hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to be able to actually produce the technology,” Wang said.
Second, Wang said that Meta has an “incredibly talent-dense team.” He said one guideline for building the team is that MSL members need to be in the “very top handful” of other AI labs.
Wang said that the team of about 100 people is smaller than that of other AI labs. Zuckerberg previously said that a smaller team was ideal for driving research.
“Truly having this incredibly talent-dense team is going to prove to be a huge differentiator,” Wang said.
Wang shared how his team would be structured, with teams focusing on research, product, and infrastructure. Wang had previously shared the MSL team structure in an internal memo, Business Insider previously reported.
“We’re going to be incredibly bold, and we have the scale of products and businesses to be able to deploy superintelligence to every person on the planet,” Wang said on TBPN.
Meta’s hot AI hiring summer
Meta has been on an aggressive — and expensive — AI talent hiring spree. In June, it made headlines for $100 million signing bonuses to lock down hires in the cutthroat AI race.
The competition reached another level when Meta recruited Wang in June as part of a $14.3 billion deal to take a 49% stake in Scale AI.
But Meta slowed its hiring spree last month. In a statement to Business Insider, Meta called the hiring freeze in its artificial-intelligence division “basic organizational planning.”
The Meta spokesperson said the company is “creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”
The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the freeze, said it also bars employees in the division from transferring across teams. The Journal added that the duration of the freeze hasn’t been communicated internally.
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