Mark Zuckerberg reshapes Meta’s AI division as internal tensions grow

Meta has split its AI group into four new teams as Mark Zuckerberg pushes for faster progress on superintelligence.

Meta is restructuring its artificial intelligence operations once again, this time breaking up its Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) into four separate teams. The decision, first reported by The New York Times and confirmed by Bloomberg, comes amid rising employee tensions and intensifying competition with OpenAI and Google in the race to build advanced AI systems.

The company’s internal memo, circulated by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s newly appointed chief AI officer, sets out the rationale. “Superintelligence is coming, and in order to take it seriously, we need to organise around the key areas that will be critical to reach it — research, product and infra,” Wang wrote. He joined Meta earlier this year after serving as chief executive at Scale AI, and he is now tasked with leading the company’s most ambitious AI project to date.

The overhaul will divide MSL into four units: MSL Product, MSL Research, MSL Infra and MSL Ops. As part of the restructuring, Meta’s AGI Foundations group, which was one of its three core AI teams, will be dissolved. Leaders Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel will instead focus on “strategic MSL initiatives,” according to the memo.

While the company has clarified that no layoffs are directly tied to this reshuffle, the Times reports that Meta is actively considering headcount reductions in its AI arm, which now employs several thousand people. Some senior executives are also expected to depart. At the same time, Meta is said to be weighing the use of external AI models rather than building everything in-house, a sign that pragmatism is beginning to outweigh the company’s traditional preference for proprietary technology.

The new structure also brings with it a reshuffling of leadership roles. Aparna Ramani has been appointed to lead MSL Infra, while Robert Fergus, co-founder of Meta’s FAIR research lab in 2014, will continue to head MSL Research. Fergus returned to Meta earlier this year after a stint at Alphabet’s DeepMind. Meanwhile, Loredana Crisan, a vice president within the generative AI group, is reportedly leaving to join design software company Figma.

Meta has spent billions of dollars hiring leading AI talent, with some researchers receiving compensation packages in the hundreds of millions. This shake-up is widely seen as an attempt by Mark Zuckerberg to extract greater results from those investments and accelerate progress towards “superintelligence” — a type of AI that could, in theory, outperform humans across a range of tasks.