Facebook parent Meta (META), Meta quest is spending billions of dollars to gain an advantage in the AI race, constructing the data centers required to develop and power high-end big language models. And now, the corporation is investing billions more in acquiring top talent and technologies in order to get a competitive advantage in the AI space.
Meta has hired three OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) researchers from its Zurich office, including Google DeepMind alumni Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai, according to The Wall Street Journal late Wednesday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reports that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered the company’s employees up to $100 million to join his AI projects.
Meanwhile, Meta is allegedly in talks to hire Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former Github CEO Nat Friedman for its proposed superintelligence lab. According to CNBC, Zuckerberg initially wanted to acquire the entire Safe Superintelligence company but was turned down by co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
The changes come after Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI firm Scale AI and appointed Alexandr Wang as CEO and co-founder. That’s not all: Meta attempted to acquire Perplexity AI (PEAI.PVT) but was unable to reach an agreement.
“Meta’s doing this because they want to win the AI race, period,” Forrester analyst Mike Proulx told Yahoo Finance. “AI is everything right now.”
All of this comes after Meta decided to postpone the launch of their enormous Llama 4 Behemoth AI model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the business will not release the model until later this fall due to worries that it isn’t a significant increase over previous generations.
“I think this is two things: No. 1 [is] confirmation that Llama is struggling,” Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster told Yahoo Finance. “And second, is [it’s] also a sign that Zuckerberg is not OK with that.”
Meta’s goal is clear: bring in as much new talent as possible to advance its AI program and grab the lead in the AI warfare.
Meta’s AI moves
Meta’s attempt to conquer the AI world differs from its main competitors, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and others. Instead of locking down its AI models, the company makes them available as open-source software that developers and businesses may use on their own.
Meta imposes several constraints on how users can use its models. For example, if a company’s product has more than 700 million monthly active users, Meta demands that they acquire a license.
Regardless, Meta’s ultimate goal is to make as many people as possible comfortable utilizing and producing products with its AI models. Why not charge everyone who wants to use their software? Because Meta benefits whenever a company changes its models, it gains a better understanding of how to enhance them in the future.
Meta isn’t really interested in selling access to its models, either. In contrast to Microsoft (MSFT), which sells AI services as part of productivity software packages, the company primarily employs AI to fuel its advertising and content recommendation services.
Meta CFO Susan Li told investors on the company’s most recent earnings call that user time spent on the Threads app has increased by 4% after Llama was included to its recommendation systems at the end of last year.
Meta also relies on its AI models to offer intelligence for its hardware products, such as the Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses and other upcoming AI-powered gadgets.
“Why Meta is making these moves is that they’ve got a ton of money, and so with that money, they are in a good position to, if they can’t build it themselves, acquire the talent and capabilities necessary to …leapfrog the competition,” Proulx explained to me.
However, Meta is not the only corporation surrounding Silicon Valley’s AI start-ups. Apple is also apparently considering acquiring its own AI startup as it seeks to better its own AI fortunes.
Apple was scheduled to introduce an AI-powered version of Siri earlier this year, but the deployment has been delayed until later this year due to internal development issues.
According to Bloomberg, Apple has also expressed interest in purchasing Perplexity AI.
While a Perplexity spokesman stated that the business had no knowledge of current or future M&A conversations, they added, “It shouldn’t be a surprise that the best OEMs in the world want to offer the best search and most accurate AI for their users, and that’s Perplexity.”
While a Perplexity spokesman stated that the business had no knowledge of current or future M&A conversations, they added, “It shouldn’t be a surprise that the best OEMs in the world want to offer the best search and most accurate AI for their users, and that’s Perplexity.”
Samsung, an Apple competitor, is also apparently looking to incorporate Perplexity into its products.
Meta success will be determined by its ability to entice the appropriate people from the right AI firms to join its AI push, catapulting the company to the top of the AI race. If it can’t, the social media behemoth may sink deeper without a clear route forward.
