Meta joins the rush for superintelligence

Mark Zuckerberg wants to play a bigger role in the development of superintelligent AI — and is willing to spend billions to recover from a series of setbacks and defections that have left Meta lagging and the CEO steaming.Why it matters: Competitors aren't standing still, as made clear by recent model releases from Anthropic and OpenAI and highlighted with a Tuesday night blog post from Sam Altman that suggests "the gentle singularity" is already underway.To catch up, Zuckerberg is prepared to open up his significant wallet to hire — or acqui-hire — the talent he needs.Meta wants to recruit a team of 50 top-notch researchers to lead a new effort focused on smarter-than-human artificial intelligence, a source told Axios on Tuesday, confirming earlier reporting by Bloomberg and the New York Times.As part of that push, the company is looking to invest roughly $15 billion to amass roughly half of Scale AI and bring its CEO, Alexandr Wang, and other key leaders into the company, The Information reported. Zoom in: Scale itself would likely continue its current work, albeit without Wang and some other top talent.Zuckerberg has also been making eye-popping offers to individual researchers, which the Times says can stretch from seven to nine figures.Between the lines: Meta is hoping to woo leading AI researchers by making the case that it has the resources and ongoing business to fund such a lofty ambition. But Scale AI is an unusual target. The company has built its business by focusing on the more manual tasks of AI — using humans to label data. However, Wang is close to Zuckerberg and seen as a rising star — a self-made billionaire and someone the Meta boss hopes can convince others to join the ambitious research effort.And Meta isn't a newcomer to the field. The company has released several versions of its open-source Llama models, published extensively and inserted its Meta AI chatbot into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.Yes, but: The company has reportedly struggled with performance in its latest models and has also seen some top researchers head for the exits, including AI research head Joelle Pineau, who announced in April that she was leaving the company.The big picture: A Meta-Scale AI deal would follow a growing trend: tech giants buying parts of promising AI startups to secure key talent or intellectual property, without acquiring the full company. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with consumer chatbot creator Inflection AI. Microsoft got the services of Inflection CEO (and DeepMind co-founder) Mustafa Suleyman as well as other colleagues and technology. Inflection's investors got an immediate return while also leaving in place a slimmed-down operation focused on sales to businesses.Google made a similar arrangement with Character.AI, acquiring key talent and a technology license, handing over millions to Character.AI's investors without buying the entire company.It's unknown whether this approach will ultimately pass muster, as some regulators in the U.S. and abroad see these deals as meriting further scrutiny, similar to outright acquisitions.Zoom out: Meanwhile, the march to superintelligence continues at breakneck speed, fueled by giant investments in computing power and data centers."We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started," Altman wrote in his blog post Tuesday. "We have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them."What we're watching: What happens to Scale AI is particularly interesting given its role providing data labeling services to a host of companies including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta itself.

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