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

Key points

• A year after Mark Zuckerberg installed Alexandr Wang to jolt Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts into wartime mode, the $1.5 trillion company has produced Muse Spark, its most credible AI model yet.
• By handing responsibility for Meta’s AI revival to a then-28-year-old start-up founder rather than a veteran researcher, Zuckerberg bet that an outsider’s urgency and ambition could succeed where the company’s established AI organization had struggled.
• According to interviews with current and former Meta employees, and associates of Wang, the billionaire wunderkind has now begun to eke out results, while navigating criticism over his experience, early research challenges, and the esoteric internal politics of working at a Big Tech behemoth.
• In nearly 12 months, Wang has assembled an elite research group on multimillion-dollar salaries, reshaped parts of Meta’s AI operation, and emerged as one of the most influential executives inside the company—the only Meta leader alongside Zuckerberg to attend a...