Meta’s ambitious new Superintelligence Lab is already facing challenges, with at least eight employees leaving the company less than two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the initiative. The division, called Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), aims to bring “personal superintelligence” to everyone.
Several of the departing employees are longtime Meta veterans who helped build some of the company’s core AI infrastructure, according to Business Insider. For example, Bert Maher, who spent 12 years at Meta, recently left to join Anthropic. Tony Liu, a manager of PyTorch GPU systems for more than eight years, announced his departure to start a newsletter on scaling AI systems. Chi-Hao Wu, an AI specialist, left after five years to become chief AI officer at the startup Memories.ai. Aram Markosyan, a research scientist focused on safety and fairness for large AI models, also departed, though his next move is unclear.
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Some employees are moving to Meta’s biggest AI rival, OpenAI. Chaya Nayak, Meta’s director of generative AI product management, joined OpenAI to work on special initiatives. Afroz Mohiuddin, a senior staff engineer who had joined Meta last year, also left for OpenAI.
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Recent hires have left too. According to Wired, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight returned to OpenAI after very short stints at Meta. Rishabh Agarwal, who joined from Google DeepMind in April, announced he was leaving the company. Agarwal wrote on X that he appreciated Meta’s “talent and compute density” but wanted to take “a different kind of risk.”
These departures raise questions about the future of MSL, which Zuckerberg had hoped would accelerate Meta’s progress in artificial general intelligence.
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