Those leaders include former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, CNBC reported, citing an internal memo. Zuckerberg also said Meta had hired 11 other people in the last few weeks to join the team.

The new unit will include teams working on Meta’s foundation models, product, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and the next generation of its models, according to the report.

“I’ve spent the past few months meeting top folks across Meta, other AI labs, and promising startups to put together the founding group for this small talent-dense effort,” Zuckerberg said in the memo, per the report. “We’re still forming this group and we’ll ask several people across the AI org to join this lab as well.”

Meta did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.

It was reported June 10 that Zuckerberg was personally recruiting experts for Meta’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team, recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who had met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California.

Zuckerberg had been clear about making AI a priority for Meta, but had recently gone into “founder mode,” with a hands-on approach to management, the June 10 report said.

It was reported June 18 that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Meta was offering $100 million signing bonuses to poach his workers as it tried to catch up in the AI race.

Scale AI, which is a data-labeling startup, announced June 12 that it had received a “significant investment” from Meta and that Wang would join Meta while also continuing to serve as a director on Scale’s board of directors.

It was reported June 18 that Meta was in talks to hire Friedman and Daniel Gross, who are AI investors, and partially buy out their venture capital fund, NFDG, which has invested in AI startups like Perplexity, The Bot Company and Safe Superintelligence.

According to Monday’s CNBC report, Meta hired both Friedman and Gross.