Meta Poaches Top Engineers for AGI Team

Meta has reportedly poached some top engineers from tech firms for its artificial general intelligence (AGI) team.

One engineer who confirmed he is moving to Meta is Jack Rae, a principal researcher at Google DeepMind, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (June 11).

Alexandr Wang, co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, and other employees from that company are expected to join the team after Meta finalizes a not-yet-announced multibillion-dollar investment in the firm, the report said, citing unnamed sources.

Meta is looking to hire about 50 people for the team, including a chief scientist who will oversee it, according to the report.

It was reported Tuesday (June 10) that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who have met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto in recent weeks.

While Zuckerberg has been clear about making AI a priority for Meta, he has reportedly gone into “founder mode,” with an increasingly hands-on approach to management.

The building of the AGI team is born out of Zuckerberg’s frustration with the tech giant’s limitations in AI and his goal of turning Meta into a leader in the field of AGI, or machines that can perform tasks at the same level as humans.

It was reported Sunday (June 8) that Meta is weighing a multibillion-dollar investment in Scale AI, which offers data labeling services that help businesses train machine learning models.

Scale AI was valued at $13.8 billion following a funding round that raised $1 billion in the spring of 2024. Meta was among the investors in that round.

The reported investment now being weighed by the company would mark Meta’s largest-ever outside expenditure on AI, a rare move for a company that has largely depended on internal research.

Zuckerberg said in a January post on Facebook that Meta plans to invest $60 billion to $65 billion in capital expenditures and grow its AI teams “significantly” this year, adding that 2025 will be a “defining year” for AI.

“This is a massive effort, and over the coming years it will drive our core products and business, unlock historic innovation, and extend American technology leadership,” Zuckerberg said in the post.