Inside Meta's attempts to play catch-up with AI

Both Wang and Zuckerberg have offices inside the work area, while non-TBD staff have occasionally been caught trying to sneak in. Early on, TBD encountered some teething problems, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Some staff were poached by rivals, including Ruoming Pang, a former Apple executive, who left after just seven months to OpenAI. Certain research efforts, including initiatives to develop an entirely new codebase for training models, have faced challenges, several people said. In the end, Muse Spark was built using some elements of Meta’s pre-existing AI infrastructure, including code and datasets associated with Llama 4, according to people familiar with the project. Subsequent comments by Wang suggesting Muse Spark had been developed “from scratch” irritated some who felt the contributions of the Llama team were not acknowledged, in a sign of deepening tensions between the company’s established AI teams and the TBD lab. With the TBD team in place, Wang has sought to establish a roadmap that combines his and Zuckerberg’s vision for “personal superintelligence” with the convictions of individual researchers and the practical realities of scaling the infrastructure needed to train future generations of models, according to people familiar with his thinking. …