Meta spared no expense in building a new AI team last year, handing out multimillion-dollar salary packages to poach researchers at the heart of its superintelligence strategy. But those who joined were not motivated by money alone, according to Alexander Wang, head of AI company Meta who joined from his startup Scale AI.
“It is a false assumption to believe that researchers are only financially motivatedWang said during an episode of the program Core Memory Podcast Released yesterday (May 13). “For most of them, in fact, the financial prospects for staying wherever they are are looking very good as well.”
Wang himself was one of Meta’s most valuable employees. The 29-year-old joined the company’s startup Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team last June, after Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI — the data classification startup he previously led — in a deal valued at $14.3 billion. Before that, Wang was in talks with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has become increasingly “infected with AGI,” dissatisfied with the progress of Meta’s Llama 4 model, and eager to reset the company’s AI trajectory, Wang said.
Wang now oversees the MSL, which is divided into four groups. The largest, which has not yet been named, focuses on advanced AI research and includes talent from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Meta allegedly offered some OpenAI researchers signing bonuses of up to $100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed last year.
Wang pushed back on the idea that metas simply wormed their way into the AI race, calling it one of the biggest “narrative violations, or perhaps differences between external perception and what it is like day to day on the inside.” He said the perception stems in part from how quickly Meta moves. “When I joined, I knew that if we wanted to build great models, we had to have the team in place yesterday, so we had to get started and do it very, very quickly.”
Instead, Wang sees it as the MSL culture that attracts talent. He cited each researcher’s high compute, streamlined teams, and willingness to support ambitious research bets as key attractions.
However, Meta’s hiring spree has rubbed some industry figures the wrong way. Altman, who was once a friend of Wang and lived with him during the COVID-19 pandemic, did just that He reportedly described Meta’s behavior as “rather distasteful.” Ashley Vance, host of the show Core Memory Podcasttold Wang that the OpenAI chief “didn’t have great things to say” about him before the episode.
Such tensions are nothing new in Silicon Valley. Altman has too Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was targetedwhich is currently In the midst of a California trial Arising from a lawsuit filed by Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI.
“I think some of this is unfortunate,” Wang said of industry rivalries. “My real hope is that all this animosity will subside over time, and then people will come together and realize that we are building this very important technology.”
Criticisms from Yann LeCun
Wang also faced criticism from Yan Liqun, a prominent researcher who died last year after more than a decade crafting its AI strategy. In an interview with the Financial Times in January, Licon described Wang as… “Young” and “inexperienced”.
“Yan is a very prominent and outspoken person, and I believe everyone always knows what Yan is thinking,” Wang said. It appears that the two have since reconciled: they met in India a few weeks after the interview, where LeCun congratulated Wang on the launch of MSL’s latest Muse Spark model.
Wang also defended his background, pointing to his early experience as a software engineer at Addepar and Quora before founding Scale AI at the age of 19. As for the criticism related to his age, he remains unfazed. “People have said that the whole time I’ve been in Silicon Valley.”
More broadly, Wang said, public scrutiny falls within the territory reserved for prominent AI leaders. “It can be frustrating, but I choose to channel it into the work we do and what we put out there.”
