Meta’s new hires offer a glimpse into its nascent superintelligence unit, aimed at making the social media company’s AI capabilities more competitive with industry leaders. The new team holds a wide gamut of skillsets, with some specific expertise in image generation, perception, synthetic data, and reasoning. The résumés suggest Meta is working on the kind of voice- and image-supported multimodal models with reasoning capabilities to more directly take on OpenAI’s suite of products.
The hiring of Pei Sun, who developed two generations of Waymo’s perception models, is particularly interesting given Meta’s investments in augmented reality headsets and glasses. It points to a continued integration of AI into devices, in which Meta could carve out a niche as OpenAI begins its partnership with Jony Ive and Apple investigates integrating an outside AI model into Siri.
OpenAI supplied the largest share of talent, followed by Google and its DeepMind unit. In a memo sent to OpenAI staffers, CEO Sam Altman hinted that the company is reevaluating compensation and criticized Mark Zuckerberg’s recruiting efforts, saying, “Missionaries will beat mercenaries,” Wired reported.
