Meta goes on the hunt for brains (and memes) in the race for supreme AI
Attention, earthlings! Meta has just reorganized her house like it was an episode of Black Mirror and has created the Superintelligence Labs, a laboratory with a name so ambitious that even Skynet would be envious. Their mission: achieve artificial superintelligence (or ASI, for the cool kids who use acronyms). Basically, they want to create something smarter than us humans at… well, everything. Worried? Us too, but at least we will have memes.
Because yes, while OpenAI and Meta compete for who has the shiniest algorithm, Zuckerberg’s team is recruiting talent like they were legendary Pokémon. The prize? A succulent 100 million dollars (yes, you read that right) for the star researchers. And looking at the list of transfers, it seems that the check has not been a dead letter.
The AI dream team (and those who jumped ship from OpenAI)
The lab is led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, who is probably more excited now than a kid in a LEGO store. But the juicy thing is in the reinforcements: Nat Friedman (ex-GitHub), Daniel Gross (co-founder of Safe Superintelligence) and, oh surprise, half a team that previously worked on OpenAI. Among them is Trapit Bansal, one of the brains behind OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model, and others like Shuchao Bi (the wizard of GPT-4o) or Hongyu Ren (which sounds like the name of an AI superhero).
And of course, the internet has not been slow to react. Between memes of Zuckerberg signing talent as if it were Real Madrid and conspiracy theories about whether this will end in a “HAL 9000 but with personalized advertising”, the hype is served.
As if that were not enough, Meta has also been buying AI startups like they were trading cards: Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Labs (by Mira Murati) and even Perplexity. The plan? Have so much computing power that even ChatGPT blushes.
The million-dollar question: Will they be able to create an AI that makes us look ridiculous or will it just be another pharaonic Silicon Valley project? While we find out, at least we will have technological gossip for the WhatsApp group.
Can you imagine an AI smarter than your ex? Share this note and tag that friend who always talks about Skynet.Do you want more meme-flavored tech stories? Explore our related content and don’t miss the next chapter of “Meta vs. OpenAI: War of egos (and algorithms)”.
