Meta spared no expense in building up a new A.I. team last year, shelling out multimillion-dollar pay packages to poach researchers at the heart of its superintelligence strategy. But those who joined weren’t driven by money alone, according to Alexandr Wang, Meta’s A.I. chief who joined from his startup, Scale AI.

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“It’s an incorrect assumption to think that the researchers are just money-motivated,” said Wang during an episode of the Core Memory Podcast published yesterday (May 13). “For most of them, actually, the financial prospects of them staying wherever they were looked very good as well.”

Wang himself was one of Meta’s most expensive hires. The 29-year-old joined the company’s nascent Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team last June, after Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI—the data-labeling startup he previously led—in a deal valued at $14.3 billion. Prior to that, Wang had been in talks with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had grown increasingly “AGI-pilled,” dissatisfied with the progress of Meta’s Llama 4 model and eager to reset the firm’s A.I. trajectory, said Wang.

Wang now oversees MSL, which is divided into four groups. The largest, still unnamed, focuses on advanced A.I. research and includes talent from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Meta allegedly offered some OpenAI researchers signing bonuses of up to $100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed last year.

Wang pushed back on the idea that Meta simply spent its way into the A.I. race, calling it one of the biggest “narrative violations, or maybe differences between external perception and what the day-to-day inside is like.” The perception, he said, partly stems from how quickly Meta moved. “When I got in, I knew if we wanted to build great models, we needed to have the team yesterday, so we had to just go and blitz it and do it very, very quickly.”

Instead, Wang argued, it’s MSL’s culture that attracts talent. He pointed to high compute per researcher, streamlined teams, and a willingness to back ambitious research bets as key draws.

Still, Meta’s hiring spree has rubbed some industry figures the wrong way. Altman, who was once friends with Wang and even lived with him during the COVID-19 pandemic, has reportedly described Meta’s behavior as “somewhat distasteful.” Ashlee Vance, host of the Core Memory Podcast, told Wang that the OpenAI chief “did not have flattering things to say” about him ahead of the episode.

Tensions like these are nothing new in Silicon Valley. Altman has also taken aim at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and is currently in the midst of a California trial stemming from a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, one of OpenAI’s co-founders.

“I think some of this is unfortunate,” said Wang of the industry’s rivalries. “My real hope is that all these animosities subside over time and then people sort of come together and realize that we are building this incredibly important technology.”

Criticism from Yann LeCun

Wang has also faced criticism from Yann LeCun, the prominent researcher who left Meta last year after more than a decade shaping its A.I. strategy. In a January Financial Times interview, LeCun described Wang as “young” and “inexperienced.”

“Yann is a notable, very outspoken person, and I think everyone always knows what Yann is thinking,” Wang said. The two appear to have since reconciled: they met in India a few weeks after the interview, where LeCun congratulated Wang on MSL’s recent Muse Spark model release.

Wang also defended his background, noting his early experience as a software engineer at Addepar and Quora before founding Scale AI at age 19. As for criticism tied to his age, he remains unfazed. “People have said this my whole time in Silicon Valley.”

More broadly, Wang said, public scrutiny comes with the territory for high-profile A.I. leaders. “It can be frustrating, but I choose to channel it into the work that we’re doing and what we put out there.”