Mark Zuckerberg (File Image)

In June this year, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms agreed to take a 49% stake in artificial intelligence startup Scale AI for $14.8 billion. As part of the deal, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang took top position inside Meta, leading the company’s new “superintelligence” lab. The 28-year-old founder of Scale AI, Wang has been installed as the public face of Zuckerberg’s AI reboot. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly paid billions to bring billionaire AI prodigy Alexandr Wang on board. However, it reportedly seems that all is not well between the AI wunderkind and his Boss, Mark Zuckerberg. The 41-year-old Zuckerberg is said to have backed his new hires with nine-figure compensation packages to lure top researchers from rivals, igniting a Silicon Valley poaching war. According to a report in Financial Times, Wang privately believes that CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s micromanagement of the company’s AI push is “suffocating”. Wang is said to have complained to associates that Zuckerberg’s tight grip on the effort is stifling progress, the report said, citing multiple people familiar with the situation. Report adds that cracks have begun to emerge at an executive level and that tensions have been bubbling between Wang and Zuckerberg for sometime now.As per the report, internally, some staff question whether Wang is out of his depth, given his lack of experience managing teams in a large corporation but also his expertise in AI data services rather than as an AI researcher pushing technical breakthroughs.

Alexandr Wang is reportedly clashing with Meta’s old guard

Incidentally, Wang’s arrival at Meta has created friction over the company’s fundamental approach to AI development, with his superintelligence team pushing to make the company’s next model “closed” — keeping its technology secret. This is said to mark a major departure from Meta’s longtime philosophy of open-sourcing its models for other developers to build upon, causing some old guard members to chafe at the change, the Times reported.The new leadership has chosen to abandon Meta’s previous frontier model called Behemoth, which saw its release delayed last spring after disappointing performance tests. Meta’s AI division faces a dramatic four-way split as Meta reorganizes into groups focused on research, superintelligence development, products, and infrastructure, according to the report.As the new vision and leadership have crystallised, some top names have left. Among them, in recent weeks, Meta’s longtime chief legal officer Jennifer Newstead was poached by arch-rival Apple, while chief revenue officer John Hegeman announced he too was leaving to launch a start-up.Similarly, storied chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun is departing to launch a new AI initiative. He had reportedly taken exception at having to report to Wang, while his longer-term research was hit hard by the recent cuts.