Mark Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars to expand Meta's AI team and regain its competitive edge in the field, but this strategy raises some doubts about its effectiveness.
According to US media reports, the Menlo Park, California-based group previously contacted Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, as well as Perplexity AI, a Google competitor, and the leading AI video platform Runway.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta offered individual bonuses of more than $100 million to "a significant number" of OpenAI employees to join the company, and roughly the same amount as their annual salary.
Four of them eventually accepted the offer, as did Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang.
Several media outlets reported that Zuckerberg personally led this campaign out of concern about Meta's lagging behind in the field of generative AI, despite its tens of billions of dollars in investments.
The results of Lama 4, Meta's latest flagship AI model, were disappointing after its launch in early April.
This model ranks behind all major American, Chinese, and French companies in the independent assessment platform LMArena's programming rankings, and even behind its predecessor, Lama 3, in terms of text interfaces.
Meta wants to integrate its new employees into a new team dedicated to developing "superintelligence," AI that surpasses human capabilities for understanding and reasoning.
"I think it will succeed in attracting real talent," blogger Zvi Moshovitz told AFP. "It didn't have many options, but this aspect of mercenary work is a big problem, not to mention that no one wants to work for this company and these products unless they are paid very high salaries."
He adds, "So, I don't expect Meta to succeed in dominating the AI sector."
On Wall Street, despite the stock price approaching record highs and the company's market cap reaching $2 trillion, a sense of concern is emerging.
Bird analyst Ted Mortonson explains that "institutional investors are primarily concerned with the liquidity" the company generates (cash flow) and "good capital management," adding, "and right now, there's no equivalent force" to Mark Zuckerberg.
He says, "Those who own stocks are holding onto them for AI advertising, which Meta has an excellent position in," "but they're also concerned about seeing these uncontrolled expenditures."
During an interview with the Stratchery podcast, Mark Zuckerberg explained that his group plans to completely replace marketing and advertising agencies with AI, to soon offer a turnkey solution to advertisers, thus creating a new revenue stream.
CFRA analyst Angelo Zeno, who also believes in the long-term outlook, says, "This doesn't change the short-term profit potential, as there will be more opportunities and ways to monetize AI, whether through advertising, connected devices (glasses and headphones), or even Lama."
According to The New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg is considering abandoning Lama as Meta's flagship AI platform, even if that requires using competing models.
Penn State University professor Mohammad Kaniyaz notes that generative AI is currently entering a new phase driven by digital agents, smaller models capable of performing many tasks independently.
He says, "This means Meta can thrive even without more advanced models, if they meet a specific market need," such as advertising.
As for "superintelligence," or artificial general intelligence, where the latter is equal to humans and the former surpasses them, Angelo Zeno predicts that "we will have to wait at least three to five years. But these people will need to be hired and invested heavily to ensure readiness when the transition to that stage is reached."
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