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

https://archive.is/jWJw0

> 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.

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?

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.

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

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??

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

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.

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

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.

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?

  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.