As OpenAI’s GPT-5 dominates headlines, Meta is quietly working on its own powerful artificial intelligence, and it’s centred on a project called "Llama".
In recent weeks, the company has gathered some of the brightest AI experts, many recruited from competitors, into a secretive unit called TBD Lab.
This group is at the heart of Meta’s most ambitious tech project yet, the Wall Street Journal reports.
TBD Lab is led by Alexandr Wang, Meta’s new Chief AI Officer. He joined after Meta bought a $14 billion stake in his previous company, Scale AI. Wang says the lab is focused on creating an AI that could think more intelligently than humans.
He added that in just a month, the team had already made “real, visible gains” and was working on several projects at once to “let us be bolder, move faster and hit cutting-edge breakthroughs sooner.”
One of those projects is the next version of Llama, Meta’s large language model.
The aim is to make it much smarter and more flexible, bringing it closer to the dream of true “machine superintelligence.”
The upgrade is being led by Jack Rae, who previously worked at Google DeepMind.
To make it happen, Meta has been hiring aggressively. At least 18 former OpenAI employees have joined, along with several ex-Google experts, including Tong He, and Yuanzhong Xu. Some have been offered pay packages worth billions over several years.
Not all recruits came from outside. Nine Meta employees from an infrastructure team were moved into TBD Lab after a startup led by former OpenAI leader Mira Murati tried to hire them. Meta increased their pay, and reassigned them.
The push comes as the race to build the world’s most advanced AI heats up. Zuckerberg says superintelligence could do more than improve current technology; it could unlock “ideas and inventions that we can’t even picture today.”
For now, most of TBD Lab’s work is still secret. But with so much money, talent, and ambition behind it, the project is hard to ignore.