Facebook parent Meta (META) is spending billions of dollars to grab the lead in the AI race, building out the data centers needed to develop and power high-end large language models. And now, the company is pouring billions more into snatching up top talent and technologies to grab the lead in the AI wars.
In its latest hiring coup, Meta has poached three OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) researchers — Google DeepMind alums Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — from its Zurich office, The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has offered the company's employees upward of $100 million to join his AI efforts.
Meanwhile, Meta is reportedly in talks to bag Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and former Github CEO Nat Friedman for its planned superintelligence lab. Zuckerberg was initially eyeing all of Safe Superintelligence, but was shot down by co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to CNBC.
The moves come after Meta invested $14.3 billion in AI startup Scale AI and hired its CEO and co-founder Alexandr Wang. That’s not all: Meta also wanted to buy Perplexity AI (PEAI.PVT) but couldn’t come to terms on a deal.
“Meta is 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 follows Meta’s decision to postpone the debut of its massive Llama 4 Behemoth AI model. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company won’t launch the model until later this fall over concerns that it isn’t a big enough upgrade over prior models.
Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang poses for photos at the company's office in San Francisco, May 15, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File) · ASSOCIATED PRESS “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.”
For Meta, the goal is clear: bring in as much fresh talent as possible to push its AI program forward and take the lead in the AI wars.
Meta’s AI moves
Meta’s effort to rule the AI world differs from its chief rivals, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and others. Rather than closing off its AI models, the company offers them as open-source software that developers and companies can use on their own.
Meta imposes some restrictions on how users can take advantage of its models. For instance, the company requires firms to request a license from Meta if their product has more than 700 million monthly active users.
Regardless, Meta’s ultimate goal is to get as many people as it’s comfortable with using and developing products via its AI models. Why not charge everyone who wants to access its software? Because Meta benefits every time a company alters its models, giving it greater insights into how it can improve them down the line.
Story Continues Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella, left, and Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg walk on stage at LlamaCon 2025, an AI developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) · ASSOCIATED PRESS Meta isn’t terribly interested in selling access to its models, either. The company primarily uses its AI to power its advertising and content recommendation services, unlike, say, Microsoft (MSFT), which sells its AI services as part of its productivity software packages, among other things.
Meta CFO Susan Li told investors during the company’s most recent earnings call that it saw a 4% increase in user time spent on the Threads app since introducing Llama to its recommendation systems at the end of last year.
Meta is also leaning on its AI models to provide the intelligence for its hardware products including its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses and other future AI-powered devices.
“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.
But Meta isn’t the only company circling Silicon Valley’s AI upstarts. Apple is also reportedly looking into bagging its own AI company as the iPhone maker looks to improve its own AI fortunes.
Apple was supposed to release an AI-powered version of Siri earlier this year, but has pushed the rollout until later this year as it contends with its own development difficulties.
To that end, Apple has also discussed purchasing Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg.
While a spokesperson for Perplexity said the company has no knowledge of current or future M&A discussions, 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.”
Apple rival Samsung is also reportedly looking to add Perplexity to its devices.
For Meta, it will all come down to whether it can woo the right people from the right AI firms to join its AI push and catapult the company into the pole position in the AI race. If it can’t, the social media giant could find itself falling further without a clear path forward.
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