Tech

Meta is forming a new AI engineering org for its superintelligence push, with teams as large as 50 people per manager

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Wally Skalij/Getty Images
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Meta is establishing a new applied AI engineering organization designed to accelerate the company's push toward superintelligence, according to two employees familiar with the matter.

The new organization will be headed by Maher Saba, a vice president at Reality Labs, the division responsible for Meta's metaverse products and AI-powered smart glasses. Saba's new group will report directly to Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth. Teams within the organization will have manager-to-employee ratios of up to 1:50, the people said.

Meta declined to comment.

The group will work in close partnership with Meta Superintelligence Labs, the organization that Meta created last summer and is led by former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang, to oversee the development of Meta's frontier AI models. Saba's team will build "the data engine that helps our models get better, faster," according to an internal memo, sources said. The Wall Street Journal first reported about the memo.

The new organization will have two distinct teams: one focused on building interfaces and internal tooling, and another dedicated to helping feed the AI with data.

Saba wrote in the memo that "building great models isn't just about researchers and compute," according to the employees.

Saba added that the group aims to turn capable AI models into market-leading ones. He pointed to recent AI research gains in reinforcement learning and post-training as evidence that Meta has an opening to accelerate if it invests more aggressively in this area, the people said.

The unusually flat structure reflects a broader organizational philosophy that CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined during Meta's most recent earnings call. Zuckerberg told investors that Meta is "elevating individual contributors and flattening teams" and said the company is already seeing "projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single, very talented person."

Another Big Tech company, Nvidia, is also known for its flat structure, with CEO Jensen Huang having over 30 direct reports.

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Pranav Dixit
Pranav Dixit
Pranav Dixit is the Meta Correspondent at Business Insider based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He writes about Meta’s products, policies, and internal workings while examining how the company’s decisions shape how billions of people connect and communicate.Previously, Pranav was the India-based technology correspondent for BuzzFeed News, covering the impact of Silicon Valley’s largest companies on the culture, society, and politics of more than a billion people in South Asia. He has also been a senior news editor at Engadget and ran technology coverage at the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest national newspapers.Pranav’s reporting has shed light on the human consequences of Big Tech’s quest for growth in emerging markets, and sparked widespread conversations about the impact of American technology companies on the Global South. In 2019, he won Syracuse University’s Mirror Award for a boots-on-the-ground feature about how WhatsApp misinformation sparked gruesome lynchings in rural India. He has also reported from Kashmir, a volatile geopolitical hotspot, documenting the world’s longest-running internet shutdown.His work has been widely cited by major national and international publications, and he has been featured on the BBC, Al Jazeera, and podcasts such as Vox Media’s Land of the Giants to discuss his work. He has also spoken in journalism classes including at UC Berkeley’s graduate journalism program. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vox, Time, The Information, and Al Jazeera.Pranav moved to the United States in 2021 from New Delhi, India, to be a fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, where he studied the evolution of the American tech press and ways newsrooms around the world can cover technology and society more effectively.Got a tip about Meta or anything else in Silicon Valley? Contact Pranav via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1408-905-9124), or email him at pdixit@insider.com or pranavdixit@protonmail.com. You can also reach him on WhatsApp at +857-753-3949 or DM him on X (@PranavDixit) or BlueSky (@pranavdixit.bsky.social).Pranav keeps sources anonymous. Please use a non-work device to reach out.Expertise: Meta, Facebook, WhatsApp, Llama, AI, Threads, Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, social media, platforms, immigration