Meta Platforms Management

Cool. I am still a bit confused about the relations. Can you create an good and very easy to understand overview how things relate, which department is most important, how many people work there etc. etc. Your goal would be to create a good understanding and overview that even a beginner could easily follow. Maybe to be done in Notion with a very short briefing post here

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Reality Labs COO departs following internal reorganization at the division

  • Meta’s Reality Labs Chief Operating Officer (COO) Dan Reed will depart the company after nearly 11 years.

    “I see SO much exciting opportunity in this space, to which I eventually intend to return to lead and grow something cool and exciting,” Reed wrote in a LinkedIn post. “In the meantime, I’m very excited after this 20+ year run to take an extended break and spend quality time with my wife and two boys, reconnect with friends and family, and recharge.”

  • He was COO since May 2022.

  • Reed’s departure follows a recent layoff of about 100 employees in Reality Labs and reorganization of the group in January, which saw some teams reporting to him being distributed across broader Meta leadership.

  • In February, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth told employees that 2025 will determine whether they will succeed in Metaverse.

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FAIR’s co-founder, Robert Fergus, who returned recently from Alphabet’s DeepMind, will lead the division

  • Meta appoints Robert Fergus, who recently joined the division from Alphabet’s DeepMind, to lead FAIR.

  • Fergus cofounded FAIR in 2014 and left Meta in 2020.

    “Meta’s commitment to FAIR and long term research remains unwavering. We’re working towards building human-level experiences that transform the way we interact with technology and are dedicated to leading and advancing AI research,” announced in a LinkedIn post.

  • FAIR works on long-term projects that may not be tied to a consumer product and was responsible for building the original Llama.

  • FAIR was until recently led by Joelle Pineau.

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Good video on Mark Zuckerberg’s management style (min 28:00);

  • He said he doesn’t like managing people.

    “I think if you’re going to report to me, you need to be able to manage yourself,” he said.

  • He has a small group of 25-30 people that he engages with directly, other than the heads of product groups.

    “Those people are all brilliant and I work with them super closely, but I also go directly to the people who are running whatever the thing is that I care about, so we’re very nonhierarchical in that way,” he pointed out.

  • He doesn’t believe in delegating.

In general, it strikes me that Zuckerberg is the type of CEO who likes to be directly involved in each product development.

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I think no great CEO manages people because this is way too time costly. Instead they only work with excellent & highly autonomous leaders.
When we are analyzing companies we should always put emphasis on the level of talent a company hired & can attract and retain.
People like Elon Musk for example are extremely good at this. Given he is among the most admired entrpreneurs a lot of the best people want to work for him and he is very good at recruiting very strong & brilliant first principles thinkers.

In addition great leaders are often involved in the details as well as a way to make sure work is great in all small nuances and the company hired the right people for the different lines of product.

Overall i have very high trust in the execution at Meta but believe that some parts of their business like their core algorithms, instagram have better execution teams than others like reality labs or llama.

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Meta divides its AI team into two to speed up execution, no senior official is leaving due to the changes

  • Meta divides its AI team into two; AI products team and AGI Foundations unit so as to speed up the rollout of new products and features, Axios reported citing an internal memo.
  • AI products team headed by Connor Hayes will be responsible for Meta AI assistant, Meta’s AI studio and features within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
  • AGI Foundations unit, co-headed by Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel will be responsible for the company’s Llama models and efforts to improve reasoning, multimedia and voice capabilities.
  • FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) will remain independent, though the team working on Multimedia has been moved to AGI.
  • Ahmad Al-Dahle has been the head of the original Gen AI team while Connor Hayes has been the head of product in Gen AI team.
  • Amir Frenkel was VP of engineering and product at Reality Labs.
  • The restructuring follows reports that Meta is delaying the launch of Llama 4 Behemoth due to concerns over its capabilities, April release of Llama 4 Scout and Maverick which failed to impress developers and recent departure of FAIR head Joelle Pineau.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/27/meta-ai-restructure-2025-agi-llama

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Zuckerberg is personally hiring 50 AI researchers and engineers to join a new AI team code-named Superintelligence Labs group

  • CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally hiring a team of AI researchers and engineers following the underperformance of Meta’a AI team, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the plans.
  • Zuckerberg wants to hire 50 people for the new team code named Superintelligence Labs group, including new head of AI research.
  • Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang is expected to join the new team after the deal is done.
  • The sources told Bloomberg that Zuckerberg has gone into “founder mode” in the last two months and believes that Meta should outstrip other companies when it comes to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
  • It’s not yet clear how Superintelligence Labs group will work with the existing AI teams but some employees are expected to move to the new AI team.
  • This comes after Meta recently divided its AI team into two; AI products team and AGI Foundations unit so as to speed up execution.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-10/zuckerberg-recruits-new-superintelligence-ai-group-at-meta

Assessment
Meta’s AI teams definitely needs changes or improvements following underperformance of Llama models. However, I am not sure if it’s a good thing to have multiple teams working on almost the same thing. Perhaps employees working on existing teams will be fired thereafter, which could signal that morale at the existing teams is currently low.

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  • According to employees interviewed by CNBC, Ahmad Al-Dahle new position as co-head of AGI Foundations was seen as a sign that Zuckerberg had lost confidence in him.
  • The people said Zuckerberg admires Wang (a 28 year old dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and considers him capable of being an AI leader at Meta.
  • The people said Wang will be joined by some of his colleagues from Scale AI.
  • The Information reported yesterday that Meta had agreed to pay $14.8 billion for 49% stake in Scale AI and Wang.
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Zuckerberg taking researchers from leading AI firms by offering seven- to nine-figure compensation packages

Meta is offering seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to dozens of researchers from leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Google and some have agreed to join, the New York Times reported citing people familiar with the company’s plans.

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Google DeepMind’s principal researcher and Sesame’s machine learning lead will join Meta’s “superintelligence” team

  • Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, will joined Meta’s “superintelligence” team, Bloomberg reported citing people familiar with the matter.
  • Johan Schalkwyk, a machine learning lead at AI voice startup Sesame AI will also join the team.
  • Rae confirmed he’s joining Meta while Schalkwyk declined to respond to Bloomberg’s request for a comment.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-11/meta-hires-top-researchers-from-google-sesame-for-new-ai-lab

Scale AI’s CEO Alexandr Wang will fully join Meta Platforms, Scale AI announces his replacement

Scale AI announced that its Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Droege, will replace Alexander Wang as CEO.

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Sam Altman said Zuckerberg offered OpenAI employees up to $100 million signing bonus but none has taken it up

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta offered his employees signing bonus of up to $100 million and even larger annual compensation packages but none of OpenAI’s best people has left for Meta.
  • He thinks the reason why his employees are turning down the offers is because Meta is not great at innovation and there is a cultural risk of creating jobs that could become more about money than work.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/altman-says-meta-offered-openai-staffers-100-million-bonuses

Meta in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his NFDG partner, Daniel Gross, to join its AI team

  • Meta in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and his NFDG partner, Daniel Gross, to join its AI team, the Information reported citing a person familiar with the matter.
  • NFDG is an AI-focused VC firm that not only invests between $1 million to $100 million in top AI startups, but also actively supports them via an accelerator and computing infrastructure.
  • Friedman is part of Meta’s Advisory Group, an external advisory council that advises the company on technology and product development.
  • Daniel Gross is also the CEO and co-founder of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup company whose mission is to build a superintelligent AI that is safe by design, prioritizing alignment and control from inception — no products or services until that goal is met.
  • Safe Superintelligence was co-founded by former OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever in June 2024.
  • It’s reported that Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence (valued at $32 billion in April) at the beginning of the year and hire Ilya Sutskever, but he refused the offer.
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According to insiders and former Meta employees interviewed by Bloomberg, Meta is facing reputational hurdles in its AI strategy due to the following;

  • Always shifting AI priorities.
  • Several insiders are disappointed with Zuckerberg’s gimmicky pursuits such as Snoop Dogg AI character while rivals are focused on creating AI that can meet or exceed human intelligence.
  • Demanding work coupled with bureaucracy.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-19/skepticism-over-meta-s-ai-push-raises-the-cost-to-recruit-talent

According to Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, Open AI countered the $100 million that Meta offered its AI employees (min 3:30).

Zuckerberg poaches three open AI researchers to join his superintelligence team

  • Meta poaches three OpenAI researchers, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai to join his superintelligence team, Wall Street Journal reported citing an OpenAI spokeswoman.
  • The three were working at OpneAI’s Zurich office since December 2024 but before then they were part of Google’s Deep mind.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-poaches-three-openai-researchers-eb55eea9

Meta hires OpenAi’s top AI researcher to join the superintelligence team

  • Meta has hired OpenAi’s AI researcher Trapit Bansal to work on reasoning models, Techcrunch reported citing people familiar with the matter.
  • Bansal is listed as a foundational contributor to OpenAi’s first reasoning model, o1.
  • OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood confirmed that Bansal has departed OpenAi.
  • Meta doesn’t offer a reasoning model yet.

Meta poaches four more top OpenAI researchers

  • Meta has poached four more notable AI researchers from OpenAI.
  • The four researchers include Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, Shengjia Zhao and Hongyu Ren.
  • Jiahui Yu led OpenAI’s Perception team, which is responsible for making AI models like GPT process and understand the world beyond text, including images, video, and possibly other modalities.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-28/meta-taps-four-openai-researchers-for-superintelligence-team

Alexander Wang will be Meta’s Chief AI Officer and will co-lead the Superintelligence team with former Github CEO Nat Friedman

  • According to an internal memo, Meta’s Superintelligence team will be co-lead by former Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang and former Github CEO Nat Friedman, the Wired reported.
  • Wang will be the company’s Chief AI Officer while Friedman will focus on AI products and applied research.
  • The new organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) will include all Meta Platforms foundations, product, FAIR teams and a new lab focused on developing the next generation of AI models.
  • Here are other new recruits including those I already reported above: