Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., arrives for the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
Meanwhile, revenue growth in the second quarter likely slowed to 15%, down from 22% a year earlier, according to LSEG. It would be the slowest rate of expansion for the company since early 2023, and analysts are expecting lower levels of growth in the coming quarters.
Although Meta's AI talent grab may not result in the company raising its projection for 2025 total expenses , estimated to come in between $113 billion to $118 billion, Cantor analysts said in a note published earlier this month that the investment potentially "moves the target above the low end." Translation: all that hiring comes with a cost, albeit slight.
Gross was previously the CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence, which Meta tried to buy before being rebuffed by co-founder Ilya Sutskever. While Meta couldn't land the AI pioneer and former OpenAI co-founder, it did hire multiple top researchers from competitors like the ChatGPT maker, Apple and Google to help it regain its footing in the fiercely competitive artificial intelligence market. One such hire was ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao , who Zuckerberg last week named as his new AI lab's chief scientist.
Meta's AI blitzkrieg kicked off in June, when it invested $14.3 billion into Scale AI, resulting in the data annotating startup's CEO, Alexandr Wang, joining Meta along with a handful of employees to oversee a cornerstone AI unit. This new Meta Superintelligence Labs will be led by Wang, now Meta's chief AI officer, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who also joined the company in June along with business partner Daniel Gross.
When Meta reports second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Zuckerberg will make the case to investors for his AI hiring spree and the company's related strategy shift.
In a rush to mimic the techniques developed by Chinese startup DeepSeek, Meta released a new version of its Llama family of AI models that disappointed third-party developers, according to people familiar with the matter. The reaction was so bad that CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to spend billions of dollars to revamp the company's AI unit, and he's still considering more shake-ups to Meta's AI strategy, said the people, who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.
Over the years, Meta has built a reputation for using rivals' innovations to bolster its technology. But its decision to copy a Chinese artificial intelligence lab in 2025 in an effort to compete with OpenAI backfired, forcing the company to overhaul its AI strategy.
Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI speaks on CNBC's Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 23, 2025.
Zuckerberg believes that new AI talent as part of the Superintelligence unit is worth it if Meta can regain its momentum and potentially create more powerful AI technology that steamrolls the competition, CNBC reported in June.
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