Meta is doubling down on AI with major hires and acquisitions to grab the lead. The company recently poached three top researchers — Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai — from OpenAI’s Zurich office, according to The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claims Mark Zuckerberg has offered his employees over $100 million to jump ship.
Meta is also in talks to recruit Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross and ex-Github CEO Nat Friedman for its superintelligence lab, CNBC reports. Zuckerberg had wanted to buy Safe Superintelligence outright but was blocked by co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
The hiring spree follows Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in AI startup Scale AI and hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang. Meta also tried to acquire Perplexity AI but couldn’t close the deal. 
Forrester analyst Mike Proulx said to Yahoo Finance:
"Meta is doing this because they want to win the AI race, period."
"AI is everything right now."
Meta recently postponed the launch of its Llama 4 Behemoth model amid concerns it doesn’t significantly outperform previous versions, The Wall Street Journal reports. Deepwater Asset Management’s Gene Munster commented:
“I think this is two things: No. 1 [is] confirmation that Llama is struggling.”
“And second, is [it’s] also a sign that Zuckerberg is not OK with that.”
Meta’s AI approach leans toward open-source releases with some licensing restrictions — companies with more than 700 million active users need a Meta license. This strategy encourages usage and model tweaking, feeding back improvements to Meta.
Meta’s CFO Susan Li said the Threads app saw a 4% usage boost after integrating Llama into recommendations. The company also uses AI to power Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses and other hardware.
Proulx added:
“Why Meta is making these moves is that they’ve got a ton of money, and so with that money, they are in a good position to, if they can’t build it themselves, acquire the talent and capabilities necessary to …leapfrog the competition.”
Apple and Samsung are also circling Perplexity AI, with Apple delaying an AI-powered Siri launch.
Meta’s race now hinges on recruiting top AI talent and tech. Without that, it risks falling behind competitors like OpenAI, Google, and xAI.
