The social media giant plans to hire about 50 staff including a new head of AI research, sources told Bloomberg. The firm is also in negotiations to invest more than US$10 billion in Scale AI, whose Alexandr Wang would join Meta’s superintelligence team. (Bloomberg)

Talking point: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly recruiting researchers and engineers for the new team himself, as he looks to join the race for artificial general intelligence (AGI) to match and then surpass human smarts. The firm’s scientists have long worked on the technology’s foundations under field pioneer Yann LeCun, who’s argued that the large language models powering the current generative AI boom won’t lead to AGI. But last year Meta reorganized to make those researchers work more closely with the teams that build products like its Llama models. Last month, Montreal computer scientist Joelle Pineau left the company after two years spent running its network of Fundamental AI Research labs.