When Meta agreed to a deal valuing Scale AI at roughly $14 billion and hired its founder Alexandr Wang to help lead its next phase of artificial intelligence work, it was framed as a statement of intent. Mark Zuckerberg wanted speed, ambition and outside thinking as Meta chased rivals in the race toward advanced AI systems.
Now, according to reports, that marriage is already under strain.
Wang, who joined Meta earlier this year to co-lead its superintelligence efforts, has privately expressed frustration with how CEO Mark Zuckerberg manages the AI organisation. People familiar with internal discussions claimed Wang views Zuckerberg’s hands-on approach as “suffocating,” limiting the autonomy he expected when he signed on.
The tension highlights how hard it is to graft startup culture onto a company of Meta’s size. Wang built Scale AI as a fast-moving infrastructure company powering data pipelines for AI labs, governments and defence clients. At Meta, decisions run through layers of review, and the CEO himself remains deeply involved in product and research priorities.
Pressure inside the AI group has been building. Nat Friedman, who joined Meta last year to help integrate AI models into consumer products, is facing growing strain as leadership pushes teams to deliver visible results quickly. Engineers have complained internally about shifting priorities and compressed timelines.
Zuckerberg has made no secret of his urgency. After Meta’s open-source AI push failed to decisively outpace competitors like OpenAI and Google, he reorganised teams and poured more money into compute, talent and infrastructure. The Scale AI deal was part of that reset, aimed at bringing in operators who know how to build at scale.
But news reports suggest a familiar pattern: founders accustomed to independence colliding with a founder-CEO who still tightly controls the company he built. Zuckerberg has historically taken a strong hand in shaping Meta’s biggest bets, from the News Feed to the metaverse and now AI.
Meta has not publicly commented on the report, and neither Wang nor Friedman has spoken on the record about internal tensions. Still, the episode underlines a broader truth in today’s AI boom. Writing cheques and hiring star names is only the first step. The harder task is aligning incentives, culture and decision-making when billions of dollars and strategic credibility are on the line.
For Meta, the stakes are high. Investors expect tangible AI breakthroughs, not just reorganisations. For Wang, the challenge is different: figuring out how much room there really is to operate inside one of Silicon Valley’s most tightly led giants.
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