Over the last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing Meta to ?compete more forcefully in generative AI. The company has offered huge pay packages, some worth hundreds of millions of dollars over ?four years, to court top AI researchers to a new superintelligence team.
The company has said it plans to invest $600 billion to build data centers by 2028. ?Earlier this week, it acquired
Moltbook, a social networking platform built for AI agents. Meta is also spending at least $2 billion to buy
Chinese AI startup Manus, Reuters previously reported.
Zuckerberg has alluded to efficiency gains from the investments, saying in January he was starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.
Metas plans reflect a broader pattern among major ?U.S. companies, particularly in tech, this ?year. Executives have pointed ?to recent improvements in AI systems as one reason for the changes.
In January, Amazon confirmed it would cut some
16,000 jobs, amounting to nearly 10% of its workforce. Last month, the fintech company Block ?chopped nearly
half of its staff, with CEO Jack Dorsey explicitly pointing to AI tools and their ?growing capability to ?help companies do more with smaller teams.
Metas planned AI investments follow a series of setbacks with its Llama 4 models last year, including criticism that it provided misleading results on the benchmarks it used for early versions. It abandoned the release of the largest version of ?that model, ?called Behemoth, which had been due out in the summer.
The superintelligence team has ?been working to reassert the companys standing this year by building a new model called Avocado, but the
performance of that modelhas also lagged expectations.