One year in the AI industry feels like a decade. Yet, incredibly, Mark Zuckerberg managed to pull off what could turn out be one of the most incredible pivots in tech company history. He tried that once already with the metaverse and failed. But, after a widely panned launch of its then-latest LlaMa model, Zuckerberg decided he needed a new team of AI developers to be a part of a new Superintelligence Lab. To assemble that team, Zuckerberg started throwing around enormous salaries and pay packages valued in the billions.
zuckerberg goes on a massive hiring spree including alexandr wang
The biggest hire was Alexandr Wang, the founder of Scale AI and a former MIT dropout. Wang became Meta’s Chief AI Officer to head a new unit for Superintelligence Labs.Meta invested $14 billion in Scale AI and Wang moved over to Meta in 2025.
Zuckerberg reportedly paid Wang $5 billion to come on board. “People thought Mark Zuckerberg was crazy when Meta paid Alexandr Wang $5 billion to be Meta’s Chief AI Officer. At the time, the price looked outrageous,” tech investor Adam Khoo said in an X post, as reported by Yahoo! Finance.
for a year the new superintelligence lab stayed out of the news
Since his hiring, Wang remained largely out of public view. No one knew exactly what his team was working on. I was intrigued. But, with so much other news in the AI industry, it was easy to forget about Wang and the Superintelligence Lab.
the announcement of muse, a personal Ai Agent
But, then, on Sept. 23, 2026, at the Meta Connect 2026, both Zuckerberg and Wang revealed what they were cooking up: Muse, a personal AI agent, along with a gadget for accessing it without a phone. Sound familiar? OpenAI and Johnny Ive have been working on such a device, which has yet to be released.
5 million people downloaded Muse within its first 2 weeks.
meta launches new frontier model, muse wonder
And then Meta launched a new frontier model, Muse Wonder, which received great reviews.
And impressive benchmarks:
zuckerberg and wang sat down for a victory lap — and some guinness
Zuckerberg and Wang recently sat down for what looked like a victory lap, although Zuckerberg went viral for not liking the taste of Guinness beer. Hard to believe he’s never tried it before. Wang is expanding Zuck’s horizons.
meta makes peace with apple
But there’s more. Zuckerberg, who last year criticized Apple for not making anything innovative in the past 2 decades, has formed an alliance with Apple to deploy Meta’s open-weight model on Mac Studios.
call me surprised
Not that I ever doubted Wang, but, because Meta was playing catch up from the start and then pivoted away from LlaMa and tried to start all over, I didn’t expect that Meta could actually gain on the other AI companies during this period of transition. It has.
And it appears to have positioned itself in 2 ways distinguishing it from the other AI companies: consumer personal AI agents and open-weight frontier models.
Meta’s alliance with Apple shows that it’s a new day for Meta — and Mark Zuckerberg.
