On April 15, according to "Business Insider",Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has now moved his desk among the company’s AI researchers, allowing him to witness the company’s comprehensive overhaul of its AI business up close. And, he also started programming again.


Zuckerberg

"Mark did move his desk to the AI ​​lab and now sits with Alex Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, and Nat Friedman, head of AI products," Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said at the Semafor World Economic Summit in Washington, D.C. "He's coding all day long."

From the team's perspective, McCormick joked, "They're probably thinking, Oh, great, Mark, you're giving us more advice while you're writing code."

However, she then said seriously,Zuckerberg felt compelled to be so deeply involved in the company's AI efforts.

"I think he felt very strongly that he had to understand AI at a deep technical level in order to really think about how to make our models the strongest," McCormick said.

McCormick's remarks follow reports detailing how Zuckerberg has devoted himself to Meta's AI development, especially as Meta's competition with ChatGPT, Claude and Google Gemini intensifies.

Last June, Bloomberg reported that Zuckerberg "rearranged the layout of his desks at the company's Menlo Park headquarters so that new employees can sit next to him." On Monday, the Financial Times reported that Zuckerberg "spends five to 10 hours a week writing code on different AI projects" and evaluating the work of others.

At present, Meta has invested tens of billions of dollars to form its new AI team called "Super Intelligence Laboratory", including investing approximately US$15 billion in Scale AI and recruiting its co-founder Wang Tao. Zuckerberg has been closely involved in recruiting talent for the unit.

McCormick also mentioned former GitHub CEO Friedman, who joined Meta in July last year to help lead the development of the company's AI products.

From the outside, Meta has been lagging behind other big tech companies and cutting-edge model developers in the generative AI race, and the Super Intelligence Lab team is working to reverse that impression by launching new models.

There are signs that Meta’s huge investment in building a super-intelligent lab team is starting to pay off. Meta's stock price rose 8% after the laboratory released its first AI model, Muse Spark. Zuckerberg called the model a "first milestone" for the division.