Meta’s Zuckerberg has to win AI after billions spent on ‘dream team’

When Mark Zuckerberg feels the heat, he opens his wallet.

The 41 -year -old Facebook founder and Meta The CEO is on a wave of spending like never before in an effort to position his business at the forefront of the boom of artificial intelligence and compensate for costly recent errors in a market that quickly revolutionizes the business world.

After the superb investments of $ 14.3 billion from last week in the AI ​​scale, which led to the hiring by Meta of the founder of the startup, Alexandr Wang, and a small group of its best employees, Meta now plans to hire the former CEO of Github, Nat Friedman, and its trading partner, Daniel Gross, which had been CNNBC, CNNBC, reported this week.

Meta previously tried to buy a sure superintelligence, which was launched a year ago by the co-founder of Openai Ilya Sutskever, sources told CNBC. According to other sources, Meta had previously been in talks to buy Perplexity AI, which was estimated at $ 14 billion in a round of funding in May. The people who spoke to CNBC various transaction activities asked not to be appointed due to confidentiality.

Zuckerberg told investors at the top of the call for the most recent results in April: “The major theme at the moment, of course, is how IA is transforming everything we do.” At the same time, the metallurgy of its range of capital expenses for the year at between 64 billion and $ 72 billion between 60 billion and $ 65 billion to reflect more investments in data center in AI and potentially higher equipment costs.

What Zuckerberg did not say when he was about to start bombing money mounds to reorganize his organization of AI.

“Mark Zuckerberg is in founding mode and he will not be arrested,” said Gil Luria, analyst at DA Davidson, in an interview on Friday with “money movers” by CNBC. Luria has a shopping rating on the stock, but said that to win in AI, Meta must succeed with the next round, with the dream team they build. “”

In Meta, the AI ​​is integrated into the company, its main online advertising unit and Instagram algorithms to its efforts to build the metavese. Better AI models and technologies improve existing business activities, both improving the targeting of ads and reducing costs.

However, the construction of fundamental models used by the vast community of developers – where the company competes with GoogleOpenai, Anthropic and others – is the place where Meta is considered by many as a delay.

The unique approach to Meta’s open source is built around the family of Llama models. Its latest update in April, the Llama 4 AI models was not well received by the developers. At the time, Meta published only two smaller versions of Llama 4 and said that she would end up publishing a larger and more powerful “Behemoth” model.

“In the heels of a successful deployment of Llama 3 a year ago, Llama 4 which was released this year was an absolute failure, almost by her admission,” said Luria, referring to Zuckerberg. “Meta cannot afford to fail by having the main model of AI. So they are therefore on the market while trying desperately to replace their AI team at the moment.”

Meta did not respond to a request for comments for this story.

AI Wang’s Wang was most was the head of Zuckerberg to date. While Meta wins a 49% stake in the startup, the real Zuckerberg price in the agreement was to hire Wang, a dropout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which launched his business at the age of 19.

Zuckerberg then turned his attention to Friedman and Gross from Github, who invested together in their venture capital business Nfdg. They will work on products under Wang, a source familiar with the case told CNBC on Thursday. Meta, meanwhile, will obtain participation in NFDG, according to several sources.

A Meta spokesman did not comment on the expected hires and said that the company “will share more on our superintendent efforts and the great people joining this team in the coming weeks”.

Not all Zuckerberg recruits cost billions of dollars. Some are in dozens or hundreds of millions. It is according to the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman.

Altman said on the last episode of “Non -ceiling“Podcast, whom her brother welcomed, that Meta tried to attract OpenAi employees by offering signature bonuses up to $ 100 million, with even larger annual remuneration packages.

“I heard that Meta considers that we are their biggest competitor,” said Altman on the podcast. “Their current AI efforts did not work as well as they hoped and I respect aggressiveness and that I continue to try new things.”

Meta Technology chief Andrew Bosworth told CNBC on CNBC on CNBC on Friday, Altman to thwart offers.

“The market establishes a rate here for a level of talent which is really incredible and a little unprecedented in my 20 -year career as a technological framework,” said Bosworth, who joined Meta in 2006.

Wall Street mainly gives Zuckerberg the benefit of doubt for the moment. Meta shares were flat this week after slipping around 2% last week. Actions are still up 17% for the year, exceeding Nasdaq and all Megacap peers of the company.

Argus analysts maintained their recommendation for purchase on the action this week and brought their price target to $ 790 per share, against $ 725 per share. The title closed on Friday at $ 682.35.

“The company’s ability to take advantage of the Genai progress in advertising targeting is a particularly relevant opportunity to stimulate advertising expenses, which is the cornerstone of the company,” wrote Argus analysts.

Luria de Davidson said that Zuckerberg had put more pressure on himself to transform Meta into a long-term AI leader, but said he would not bet against him.

Luria said: “The last time Mr. Zuckerberg felt like we are under the weapon”, he Instagram put on For $ 1 billion, an agreement that prepared the field for Facebook to become a dominant actor in mobile.

It was in 2012, just like Facebook was about to hit the public market. Luria also highlighted the controversial Zuckerberg Purchase of $ 19 billion in WhatsApp Two years later. He sees the meta-ceo making an equally daring bet in AI.

“He will rebuild the team and they will come back,” said Luria.

– Kate Rooney and Jonathan Vanian of CNBC contributed to this report.

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