Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/10/technology/meta-ai-tbd-lab-friction.html

by furcyd • 7 months ago

95 160 7 months ago

pinewurst• 7 months ago

andy99• 7 months ago

  That team, called TBD Lab (for “to be determined”), was placed in a siloed space next to Mr. Zuckerberg’s office at the center of Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters, surrounded by glass panels and sequoia trees.

Hooli XYZ? Silicon Valley was over 10 years ago and it seems to have aged pretty well. I wonder if this is going to be like “Yes Minister” that is close to 50 and still completely on point.

paulbjensen• 7 months ago

HBO's Silicon Valley was on point - they did their homework on nailing some of the absurdities of the industry.

atonse• 7 months ago

When I read that the dude was asked to take $2b from reality labs and spend it on AI, I was shocked… that they were still spending $2b on virtual reality nonsense in 2025.

That said, from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the algorithm.

Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?

loeg• 7 months ago

Bro they spend $4B on RL every quarter.

leptons2• 7 months ago

Well it's probably nowhere near the size of the money-pit that "AI" currently is in.

apercu2• 7 months ago

Meta prints money as an ad company but clearly resents being one.

VR was a ~$100B+ attempt to buy pivot, and it’s generated ~single-digit billions in revenue. The tech worked maybe, but the vibe sucked, and the problem was that people don’t want to live or work there. Also, Meta leadership personalities are toxic to a lot of people.

Now they’re doing the same thing with AI e.g., throw money at it, overpay new talent, and force an identity shift from the top. Longterm employees are still well paid, just not AI gold rush paid which is gunna create fractures.

The irony is Meta already had what most AI companies don’t in distribution, data, and monetization. AI could have been integrated into revenue products instead of treated as a second escape from ads.

You can’t typically buy your way out of your business model. Especially with a clear lack of vision. Yes, dood got lucky in a couple acquisitions, but so would you if you were throwing billions around.

ribosometronome• 7 months ago

clearly resents being one.

Do they? It seems to me that they're just aware that social media and the internet is trendy and they need to be out there ready to control the next big thing if they want to put ads on it. Facebook has been dying for years. Instagram makes them more ad revenue per user than FB but it's not the most popular app of its class.

sota_pop• 7 months ago

I for one have been trying to use the term “ad tech” in lieu of “big tech/faang/etc.” for a couple of years now hoping it will catch.

lawlessone• 7 months ago

from what I understand, X is working on using grok to improve the algorithm.
Why can’t fb do the same and coexist?

I'm sorry ,but what does this mean? Like are they prompting grok for suggestions on improvements? or having it write code? or something else?

laweijfmvo• 7 months ago

if you think Meta RL loses money wait until OpenAI goes public

qingcharles• 7 months ago

I still don't think Meta is wrong about VR. It's just still not the year for it. (I know the market has been saying that for 30 years)

Sol-• 7 months ago

TBD Lab’s researchers have come to view many Meta executives as interested only in improving the social media business

That cannot have been a surprise to anyone joining.

mullingitover4• 7 months ago

Meta doesn’t really have a social media business, they have an ad business that’s driven by a massive dumping operation in social media.

MangoToupe• 7 months ago

What is the difference between the two? What kind of social media business is there other than selling ads?

zeroonetwothree4• 7 months ago

That framing is silly. “NBC doesn’t have a television business, they have an ad business”. “Google doesn’t have a search business, they have an ad business.” “Amazon doesn’t have a retail business, they have an ad business.”

It doesn’t provide any value to reframe it this way, unless you think it’s some big secret that ads are the main source of revenue for these businesses.

nayroclade• 7 months ago

Perhaps not, but you can bet that they were told the opposite when Zuckerberg was recruiting them. Indeed, ring fencing the lab does suggest some real attempt to do it.

moralestapia• 7 months ago

Even if both "sides" really wanted to get along, working with someone making 100x (if not 1,000x) more than you is poised to be a weird interaction.

It must also be massively demoralizing, particularly if you're an engineer who has been there for 10+ years and has pushed features which directly bring in revenue, etc...

Btw,

But Mr. Wang, who is developing the model, pushed back. He argued that the goal should be to catch up to rival A.I. models from OpenAI and Google before focusing on products, the people said.

That would be a massive mistake. Wang is either a one-trick pony or someone who cares more about his other venture than Meta's, sad.

haliskerbas• 7 months ago

same is true in many startups

hkt• 7 months ago

True enough, but do you think the usual level of disparity is so vast that it ends up on the front page of international press outlets? I'm thinking the $100m pay offers etc

zeroonetwothree4• 7 months ago

There was a similar dynamic when FB bought WhatsApp. Although I think people kind of forgot about it after a year or two.

micromacrofoot• 7 months ago

He's not wrong, you can't compete against blue sky R&D if you're focused on making something profitable. It's the innovators dilemma.

ozgung• 7 months ago

I agree, classic innovator's dilemma. It's a new business enterprise, has nothing to do with Meta's existing business or products. They can't be under the same roof and mush have independent goals.

zkmon• 7 months ago

Meta should replace Mr Z with a bit sane person. At this point, he is like a mad emperor.

wslh• 7 months ago

Would it be a successful business? That is what matters in the market.

bloppe• 7 months ago

Zuck has unilateral majority voting power. This was probably a good thing during the financial crisis, but appears to be more of a liability these days.

seizethecheese• 7 months ago

Perhaps, yet it’s a $1.6T company nonetheless.

Ragnarockooo• 7 months ago

Zuck having unilateral majority voting power is a core reason why Facebook is a $1T+ company.

yieldcrv2• 7 months ago

As someone that pivoted to agentic work and quit the job that tried to get the existing team to do agentic work:

All companies are structuring like this, and some are more equipped to do it than others

Basically the executive team realizes the corporate hierarchy is too rigid for the lowly engineers to surface any innovation or workflow adjustments above the AI anxiety riddled middle management and bandwagon chaser’s desperate plea for job security, and so the executive creates a team exempt from it operating in a new structure

Most agentic work impacts organizations that are outside of the tree of that software/product team, and there is no trust in getting the workflow altered unless a team from upon high overwrites the targeted organization

we are at that phase now, I expect this to accelerate as executives catch on through at least mid-summer 2026

bgwalter• 7 months ago

Sounds like DOGE, a resounding success!

dingnuts• 7 months ago

Honestly the comment is so poorly written I can't figure out what the GP is trying to say. They think agent coding is going to replace all existing coding because the only reason manual coding is hanging on is because engineers can't convince middle management to let them use it?

in my experience it's management forcing agent workflows on reluctant senior engineers who are afraid to speak up about how poor the tools are, as it would be career suicide to argue that agentic workflows are anything less than the inevitable future.

Isn't there something wrong with that? I have extreme suspicion towards any tech or movement that is forced top down. How can we know the effectiveness of these tools if only praising voices are allowed? Why is the inevitability of this tech a foregone conclusion?

The critical voices are self censoring

yieldcrv2• 7 months ago

yes, exactly like DOGE, even named a such within some orgs

Lots of siloed processes tied together in a simple way neglected for decades solely because the political capital and will didn’t exist

tracker1• 7 months ago

It's not even a new thing... re Skunkworks. It's completely natural for new/developing technology to be formed in new organizations separate from incumbered corporate bureaucracy. iirc, IBM did this with the PC, that later languaged under the bureaucrats, and there are many others over the past half century.

I think the biggest issue with Meta here, is how much visibility they have to adjacent orgs, which is not too surprising given the expenditures, but still surprising. It should be a separate unit and the expenses absolutely thought of as separate from the rest of the org(s).

elzbardico• 7 months ago

Mr Z. pays engineers well, that's what counts in my book, I like Mr. Z.

Y-bar2• 7 months ago

Doctors and chemists were paid handsomely by Marlboro Tobacco and Philip Morris. Didn’t make me like the C-suite at those companies any better.

dylan6042• 7 months ago

You must not have been one of those doctors or chemists.

game_the0ry• 7 months ago

With the exception of instagram fb marketplace, meta just looks and feels like a chaotic, sloppy mess of a company. Between the incoherent and buggy garbage that is ads manager (something I have used for my own business) and zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason), it all looks like poor business operations. So its no surprise they can't figure out AI even with all the ads profits and brain power.

An adult needs to show up, put zuck back in a corner and right the ship.

twodave2• 7 months ago

zuck saying he laid off poor performers (effectively screwing those people for no reason)

Were they not actually performing poorly, then? Maybe I'm missing some context, but laying off poor performers is a good thing last I checked. It's identifying them that's difficult the further removed you are from the action (or lack thereof).

BoorishBears• 7 months ago

You're replying to someone (rightfully) pointing out that you can layoff poor performers without proclaiming it with one of the farthest reaching voices in the industry.

Anyone who's worked in a large org knows there's absolutely zero chance that those layoffs don't touch a single bystander or special case.

chihuahua• 7 months ago

From what I heard, Eric Lippert was one of the layoff victims. I find it unlikely that he was actually a poor performer, since he's an industry legend.

optymizer• 7 months ago

Several of my colleagues were laid off. We all worked on the same project. I reviewed their code and was in meetings with them daily, so I know what their performance was like. They were absolutely not poor performers and it was ridiculous that they were laid off and labeled as poor performers. The project was a success too.

lvl1552• 7 months ago

I refuse to believe that companies are allocating major ad spend to Facebook in 2025. Instagram, yes.

darkwater• 7 months ago

Why do companies allocate ad spend on regular TV channels in 2025? There is still a big cohort of people (45-70) totally hooked on Facebook.

KaiserPro2• 7 months ago

As someone who's startup got bought out by facebook, many years ago, its not surprising to read.

The politics surrounding zuck is wild. Cox left then came back, mainly because hes not actually that good, and has terrible judgement when it comes to features and how to shape effective teams (just throw people at it, features should be purely metric based, or a straight copy of competitors products. There is no cohesive vision of what a meta product should be. Just churn out microchanges until something sticks)

Zuck also has pretty bad people instincts. He is surrounded by egomangics, and Boz is probably the sanest out of all of them. Its a shame he doesn't lead engineering that well (ie getting into fights with plebs in the comments about food and shuttle timings)

He also is very keen on flashy new toys, and features, but has no instinct for making a product. He still thinks that incremental slightly broken features, but rapidly released is better than a product that works well, is integrated and has a simple well tested UI pathway for everything. Common UI language? Pah, thats for android/apple. I want that new shiny feature, I want it now. What do you mean its buggy? just pull people off that other project to fix it. No, the other one.

Schrep also was an in insightful and good leader.

Sheryl is a brilliant actor that helped shape the culture of the place. However there was always a tinge of poison, which was mostly kept in check until about 2021. She went full politician and started building her own brand, and generally left a massive mess.

Zuck went full bro and decided that empathy made shit products and decided that he like the taste of engineer's tears.

but back to TBD.

The problem for them is that they have to work collaboratively with other teams in facebook to get the stuff the need. The problem is, the teams/orgs they are fighting against have survived by competing against others ruthlessly. TBD doesn't have the experience to fight the old timers, they also don't really have experience in making frontier models.

They are also being swamped by non-ML engineers looking to ride the wave of empire building. this generates lots of alignment meetings and no progress.

chis• 7 months ago

All facts in this post. FB management always had such a shockingly different tone than other big tech companies. It felt like a bunch of friends who’d been there from the start and were in a bit over their heads with way too much confidence.

I have a higher opinion of zuck than this though. He nailed a couple of really important big picture calls - mobile, ads, instagram - and built a really effective organization.

The metaverse always felt like the beginning of the end to me though. The whole company kinda lived or died by Zuck’s judgement and that was where it just went off the rails, I guess boz was just whispering in his ear too much.

dagmx• 7 months ago

It’s both sad and believable when I hear that Boz is the most sane of them all.

Boz is such a grifter in his online content. He naturally weasel words every little point and while I have no doubt he’s smart, I don’t think I could trust him to provide an honest opinion publicly.

My friends at meta tend to not hold him in the highest esteem but echo largely what you said about the politics and his standing amongst them.

themafia2• 7 months ago

Computer scientists spending a career building advertising inventory and private data lakes while at the same time desperate to never be perceived in this light. It must make for an interesting "culture."

KaiserPro2• 7 months ago

I mean yeah, booo facebook.

The problem with that assessment is that only really the monetisation team were the ones abusing the data. They are an organisation that were very much apart from the rest, different culture and different rules.

For the longest while you could be actually making things better, of thinking you were.

When problems popped up, we _could_ apply pressure and get things fixed. The blatant content discrimination in india, instagram kids, and a load of other changes were forced by employees.

However, in 2023 there were some rule changes aimed at stopping "social justice warrior-ing" internally. It was repeatedly tightened until questioning the leaders is considered against the rules.

Its no coincidence that product decisions are getting worse.

0xbadcafebee• 7 months ago

A CEO with terrible judgement? Egomaniac executives? Products that a/b test and stick with what works? Chasing trends? Internal competition?

Sounds like every company.

dazamarquez• 7 months ago

Is Wang even able to achieve superintelligence? Is anyone? I'm unable to make sense of Wang's compensation package. What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table? Is this all a stunt to drive Meta's stock value?

ActionHank• 7 months ago

Wang is able to accurately gauge zuck’s intelligence.

this_user2• 7 months ago

The way it sounds, Zuckerberg believes that they can, or at the very least has people around him telling him that they can. But Zuckerberg also though that the Metaverse would be thing.

LeCun obviously thinks otherwise and believes that LLMs are a dead-end, and he might be right. The trouble with LLMs is that most people don't really understand how they work. They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart. But that may have created the illusion the true artificial intelligence is much closer than it really is in the minds of many people including Zuckerberg. And obviously, there now exists an entire industry that relies on that idea to raise further funding.

As for Wang, he's not an AI researcher per se, he basically built a data sweatshop. But he apparently is a good manager who knows how to get projects done. Maybe the hope is that giving him as many resources as possible will allow him to work his magic and get their superintelligence project on track.

Mistletoe• 7 months ago

What are the differences between a person that is smart and an LLM that seems smart but isn't?

Eisenstein8• 7 months ago

They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

Can you give an example of the difference between these two things?

milowata2• 7 months ago

Wang is a networking machine and has connected with everyone in the industry. Likely was brought in as a recruiting leader. Mark being Mark, though, doesn’t understand the value of vision and figured getting big names in the same room was better than actually having a plan.

nl6• 7 months ago

Humans aren't smart, they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

Prove me wrong.

irjustin• 7 months ago

They seem smart, but they are not; they are really just good at appearing to be smart

There are too many different ways to measure intelligence.

Speed, matching, discovery, memory, etc.

We can combine those levers infinitely create/justify "smart". Are they dumb? Absolutely, but are they smart? Very much so. You can be both at the same time.

Maybe you meant genius? Because that standard is quite high and there's no way they're genius today.

antonvs• 7 months ago

they are really just good at appearing to be smart.

In other words, functionally speaking, for many purposes, they are smart.

This is obvious in coding in particular, where with relatively minimal guidance, LLMs outperform most human developers in many significant respects. Saying that they’re “not smart” seems more like an attempt to claim specialness for your own intelligence than a useful assessment of LLM capabilities.

hshdhdhj4444• 7 months ago

If Zuck throws $2-$4Bn towards a bunch of AI “superstars” and that’s enough to convince the market that Meta is now a serious AI company, it will translate into hundreds of billions in market cap increases.

Seems like a great bang for the buck.

PessimalDecimal• 7 months ago

Oracle also briefly convinced the market it was a serious AI company and received a market cap increase. Until it evaporated.

ginnyaang• 7 months ago

What actual, practical skills does he bring to the table?

This hot dog, this no hot dog.

fmajid• 7 months ago

Wang never led a frontier lab. He founded a company that uses hlow-paid uman intelligence to label training data. But clearly he is as slick a schmoozer as Sam Altman to have taken in a seasoned operator like Zuckerberg.

setgree2• 7 months ago

I'm as ready to hate on Meta as anyone but this article is a bit of a nothingburger.

So there are disagreements about resource allocation among staff. That's normal and healthy. The CEO's job is to resolve those disagreements and it sounds like Zuck is doing it. The suggestion to train Meta's products on Instagram and Facebook data was perfectly reasonable from the POV of the needs of Cox's teams. You'd want your skip-level to advocate for you the same way. It was also fine for AW to push back.

. On Thursday, Mr. Wang plans to host his annual A.I. holiday party in San Francisco with Elad Gil, a start-up investor...It’s unclear if any top Meta executives were invited.

Egads, they _might_ not get invited to a 28-year-old's holiday party? However will they recover??

WhyOhWhyQ2• 7 months ago

Can somebody explain to me how giving a 28 year old kid 250 million (or was it 1 billion) to run your AI lab is a good idea? Or is it actually a dumb idea? I think it is a dumb idea, but maybe somebody can make it make sense.

rhines• 7 months ago

Well Wang used to live with Altman. What value that actually provides, I don't know. But it seems to be why he's worth this much.

setgree2• 7 months ago

well if the expected value of developing AGI is 100 quadrillion dollars -- 1000X bigger than the entire global economy -- and you think this person has a .01% chance of getting there in any given year, you should pay him 10 trillion dollars a year :)

storus• 7 months ago

So FAIR has been effectively disbanded, LeCun is moving out, Wang is doing 996 and teams are hiring to fire to insulate people who need to vest their stock. How long until the company accumulates enough stress to rupture completely?

magnitudes• 7 months ago

Lecun did not run almost anything at FAIR, he was basically an IC. FAIR has grown, not shrunk.

almostgotcaught• 7 months ago

Agree with the first part

he was basically an IC

Disagree with this part - ICs have to write code. He literally did nothing except meetings and WP posts.

octaane• 7 months ago

I feel like many of the comments are focused on the trees and not on the forest. The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot. No shit they're having problems. Can you imagine being a facebook lifer, or one of the LLM pros they've bribed/hired over to the company, to be bossed around by someone with very little life experience? No shit it isn't going well.

prng20214• 7 months ago

That’s much older than when Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Also older than when Bill Gates founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs founded Apple, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. We’re talking about running a tech company, not being a politician. Clearly there’s no need to be 50+ and have a bunch of “life experiences” to be successful.

hokumguru• 7 months ago

Founding a faang and growing it provides a very different set of life experiences than being a startup owner thrust into it.

yujzgzc2• 7 months ago

When these companies were founded, they had nowhere near the scale and resources in the hands of the current set of folks. Zuckerberg at 28 was riding a bike and this is a rocketship (pointed up or down, is not clear)

contrast• 7 months ago

You’re comparing being the founder and CEO, to being an employee hired to run a fraction of an organisation?

futuraperdita• 7 months ago

The new head of Facebook AI is 28 years old? That's not OK, that's too young. Too inexperienced and not worldwise enough by a long shot.

This is ageist in the way I don't usually expect from the Valley. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful or innovative concepts in their 20s. It is OK to state that Wang is incompetent, but that has little to do with his age and more to do with his capability.

user3939382• 7 months ago

I know more about AI than any of these people.

Meta's new A.I. superstars are chafing against the rest of the company

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