Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms. Artificial intelligence has been an integral focus for the tech giant's leader amid competition from players like OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

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Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday that he's creating Meta Superintelligence Labs, which will be led by some of his company's most recent hires, including Scale AI ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.

Zuckerberg said the new AI superintelligence unit, MSL, will house the company's various teams working on foundation models, like the open-source Llama software, products and Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) projects, according to an internal memo obtained by CNBC.

Bloomberg first reported about the new unit.

Meta's co-founder and CEO has been on an AI hiring blitz as he faces fierce competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google. Earlier in June, the company said it would hire Wang, now Meta's chief AI officer, and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI.

Meta also hired Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, who was CEO of Safe Superintelligence, the AI startup created by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, CNBC earlier reported. Meta had attempted to buy Safe Superintelligence, but was rebuffed by Sutskever.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast that Meta was recruiting AI researchers from his company, offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million.

Meta technology chief Andrew Bosworth told CNBC's "Closing Bell Overtime" in an interview on June 20, that OpenAI was countering Meta's offers.

"The market is setting a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive," Bosworth said.

Here is Zuckerberg's full internal memo released on Monday:

As the pace of AI progress accelerates, developing superintelligence is coming into sight. I believe this will be the beginning of a new era for humanity, and I am fully committed to doing what it takes for Meta to lead the way. Today I want to share some details about how we're organizing our AI efforts to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.

We're going to call our overall organization Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). This includes all of our foundations, product, and FAIR teams, as well as a new lab focused on developing the next generation of our models.

Alexandr Wang has joined Meta to serve as our Chief AI Officer and lead MSL. Alex and I have worked together for several years, and I consider him to be the most impressive founder of his generation. He has a clear sense of the historic importance of superintelligence, and as co-founder and CEO he built ScaleAI into a fast-growing company involved in the development of almost all leading models across the industry.

Nat Friedman has also joined Meta to partner with Alex to lead MSL, heading our work on AI products and applied research. Nat will work with Connor to define his role going forward. He ran GitHub at Microsoft, and most recently has run one of the leading AI investment firms. Nat has served on our Meta Advisory Group for the last year, so he already has a good sense of our roadmap and what we need to do.

We also have several strong new team members joining today or who have joined in the past few weeks that I'm excited to share as well:

I'm excited about the progress we have planned for Llama 4.1 and 4.2. These models power Meta AI, which is used by more than 1 billion monthly actives across our apps and an increasing number of agents across Meta that help improve our products and technology. We're committed to continuing to build out these models.

In parallel, we're going to start research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so. I've spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort. We're still forming this group and we'll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.

Meta is uniquely positioned to deliver superintelligence to the world. We have a strong business that supports building out significantly more compute than smaller labs. We have deeper experience building and growing products that reach billions of people. We are pioneering and leading the AI glasses and wearables category that is growing very quickly. And our company structure allows us to move with vastly greater conviction and boldness. I'm optimistic that this new influx of talent and parallel approach to model development will set us up to deliver on the promise of personal superintelligence for everyone.

We have even more great people at all levels joining this effort in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. I'm excited to dive in and get to work.

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