Background The then-named Facebook founded a AI division in 2013 as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR). It has workspaces in
Menlo Park, London, New York City, Paris, Seattle,
Pittsburgh,
Tel Aviv, and
Montreal as of 2025. In 2016, FAIR partnered with
Google,
Amazon,
IBM, and
Microsoft in creating the
Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. FAIR was directed by
Yann LeCun until 2018, when Jérôme Pesenti succeeded the role. Pesenti is formerly the
CTO of
IBM's big data group. FAIR's research includes
self-supervised learning,
generative adversarial networks,
document classification and translation, and
computer vision. FAIR released
Torch deep-learning modules as well as
PyTorch in 2017, an
open-source machine learning framework, and
Uber's Pyro. That same year, a pair of chatbots were falsely rumored to be discontinued for developing a language that was unintelligible to humans. FAIR clarified that the research had been shut down because they had accomplished their initial goal to understand how languages are generated by their models, rather than out of fear.
Founding , the chief executive of
Meta Platforms, has taken an active role in recruiting employees for Meta Superintelligence Labs. In June 2025,
Bloomberg News reported that
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of
Meta Platforms, had expressed displeasure at
Llama 4, the company's
large language model released in April, tasking employees to work overtime. In response, Meta began internally developing Behemoth, a larger model set to be more sophisticated than offerings from
OpenAI,
Anthropic, and
Google. According to
The Wall Street Journal, amid concerns from Meta's leadership over Behemoth's capabilities, the company delayed the release of the model. The decision to delay Behemoth led Zuckerberg to involve himself closely with Meta's AI efforts, starting a
WhatsApp group chat with senior leadership to recruit researchers. According to
Bloomberg News, Zuckerberg set a goal to hire approximately fifty people to staff a firm to achieve
artificial general intelligence. That month, Zuckerberg sought to invest several billion dollars into
Scale AI and hire its chief executive and founder,
Alexandr Wang. Days later, Meta announced that it was investing billion into Scale AI, an intentionally muted role despite hiring Wang in order to avoid scrutiny from the
Federal Trade Commission amid an impending decision from judge
James Boasberg in
FTC v. Meta (2020). According to
The Information, Zuckerberg was willing to provide billion, though Wang countered with billion. In order to fund the tentative firm, Meta implemented advertisements in WhatsApp.
The Information later reported that Meta was discussing hiring
Nat Friedman, the former chief executive of
GitHub, and the businessman and investor
Daniel Gross, and acquiring their venture capital firm, NFDG. According to
CNBC, Meta had sought to acquire
Safe Superintelligence Inc., but its CEO
Ilya Sutskever refused the acquisition. Additionally, Zuckerberg privately discussed acquiring
Thinking Machines Lab and
Perplexity AI, though the deals fell through over disputes concerning prices and strategy. Days later,
The Verge reported that Gross and Friedman would report directly beneath Wang. Zuckerberg assumed a dominant role in hiring employees, though his efforts faced complications from researchers who expressed skepticism at Meta's artificial intelligence, uncertainty over internal restructuring, and a perceived strategic conflict with Meta's vice president for artificial intelligence,
Yann LeCun. Additionally, several researchers were surprised to receive messages from Zuckerberg, including one person who, believing a message they received to be a hoax, did not respond for several days. In an internal memo, Zuckerberg named eleven employees the company had hired. Zuckerberg's efforts forced other AI company executives, including
Microsoft's
Satya Nadella and OpenAI's
Sam Altman, to attract researchers themselves. In July, Gross joined Superintelligence Labs as Friedman's counterpart. That month,
The New York Times reported that Superintelligence Labs executives had discussed a proprietary AI model. In August, Meta restructured Meta Superintelligence Labs into four subgroups. On November 20, 2025, Yann LeCun left Meta's chief AI scientist role to start a new firm. == Models ==