Inside Meta's attempts to play catch-up with AI

Closing the gap

Doubts linger over whether Meta can close the gap with rivals.

Credit: Financial Times

A year after Mark Zuckerberg installed Alexandr Wang to jolt Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts into wartime mode, the $1.5 trillion company has produced Muse Spark, its most credible AI model yet.

By handing responsibility for Meta’s AI revival to a then-28-year-old start-up founder rather than a veteran researcher, Zuckerberg bet that an outsider’s urgency and ambition could succeed where the company’s established AI organization had struggled.

According to interviews with current and former Meta employees, and associates of Wang, the billionaire wunderkind has now begun to eke out results, while navigating criticism over his experience, early research challenges, and the esoteric internal politics of working at a Big Tech behemoth.

In nearly 12 months, Wang has assembled an elite research group on multimillion-dollar salaries, reshaped parts of Meta’s AI operation, and emerged as...

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