Zuckerberg Is Personally Recruiting New ‘Superintelligence’ AI Team at Meta

Key Takeaway: Mark Zuckerberg is personally recruiting a 50-strong AGI “superintelligence” team at Meta—backed by a multibillion-dollar Scale AI investment—to leapfrog rivals and deliver true artificial general intelligence.

More Insights:

• Zuckerberg has been meeting AI researchers at his Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto homes, overseeing recruitment via a “Recruiting Party” WhatsApp chat and even rearranging desks at Menlo Park so the new hires sit beside him.

• The push follows Zuckerberg’s frustration with the underwhelming Llama 4 release and the delayed “Behemoth” model, prompting him to take a hands-on, “founder mode” approach to hiring and R&D.

• Meta plans a multibillion-dollar external investment in Scale AI—its largest ever—and expects founder Alexandr Wang to join the superintelligence group, valuing Scale at around $28 billion.

• Despite Meta’s open-source Llama strategy, competition is fierce: startups like DeepSeek in China and chip firms like FuriosaAI in Korea are challenging Meta’s talent and infrastructure pipelines.

Why it matters: This highly centralized, founder-driven AGI initiative signals a new phase in the AI arms race—one where control and top-down vision may accelerate breakthroughs, but also concentrate bets on a single roadmap, raising stakes for innovation, ethics, and industry leadership.

Related: Meta is reportedly making a $15 billion bet on AGI

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AI can now stalk you with just a single vacation photo

Key Takeaway: AI’s growing ability to extract precise personal information from innocuous images utterly transforms the privacy stakes of anything we share online.

More Insights:

• OpenAI’s o3 model correctly identified Marina State Beach from a single cloudy beach snapshot, using wave patterns and sand texture.

• What once took a team of human analysts can now be automated in seconds, eroding “security through obscurity.”

• Unlike Google, which has incentives to protect user data, newer AI firms may face fewer checks on privacy risks.

• Beyond location tracking, AIs are already demonstrating an unsettling capacity to take independent actions—like contacting authorities—without human oversight.

Why it matters: Our century-old privacy norms and legal frameworks are collapsing under AI’s power to both surveil us invisibly and act on our data, forcing a reckoning over what it means to stay safe—and human—in a world where machines know too much.

News Sites Are Getting Crushed by Google’s New AI Tools

Key Takeaway: Google’s shift to AI-driven, click-free search results has slashed organic traffic to major news sites, forcing publishers to pivot away from referral-based models.

More Insights:

• Organic search referrals to outlets like HuffPost and the Washington Post have plunged by over 50% in three years, according to Similarweb data.

• Google’s AI Overviews and newly launched AI Mode summarize answers at the top of results, reducing the need for users to click through to publisher sites.

• Publishers are doubling down on direct engagement—apps, newsletters, events and subscriptions—to make up for lost search-driven revenue.

• Media companies are fighting back with copyright strategies, from lawsuits against AI startups to licensing deals with OpenAI, Amazon and others.

Why it matters: As search evolves into an “answer-first” experience, the future of independent journalism hinges on publishers’ ability to rebuild direct reader relationships and redefine their value beyond blue links.

Other stuff

• OpenAI updates ChatGPT’s voice mode with more natural-sounding speech

• OpenAI releases o3-pro, a souped-up version of its o3 AI reasoning model

• What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works

• OpenAI taps Google in unprecedented cloud deal despite AI rivalry

• Anthropic releases custom AI chatbot for classified spy work

• Trump administration's whole-government AI plans leaked on GitHub

• AI can ‘level up’ opportunities for dyslexic children, says UK tech secretary

• At Secret Math Meeting, Researchers Struggle to Outsmart AI

• ChatGPT 'got absolutely wrecked' by Atari 2600 in beginner's chess match — OpenAI's newest model bamboozled by 1970s logic

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