Zuckerberg Pushes Meta to External Tools as Slow Internal Systems Stall AI Progress

Meta’s race toward artificial intelligence dominance has hit a surprising roadblock: its own internal systems. Despite investing heavily in AI, Meta’s internal developer tools have proven too sluggish, prompting CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team to look outside for help.

According to a report from Business Insider, Meta has begun urging employees working on AI projects to move away from the company’s in-house platforms and adopt widely used external services like Vercel and GitHub. The shift comes as Meta’s Product and Applied Research (PAR) division, led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, faces mounting frustration with slow deployment times.

In late September, Aparna Ramani, head of infrastructure at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), addressed the issue in a candid memo. She admitted that Meta’s internal systems take “too long” to push changes and are “not conducive to vibe coding.” The term “vibe coding” refers to an emerging approach where engineers rely heavily on AI to generate and refine code in real-time. While smaller tech teams outside Meta can deploy updates in minutes, internal delays at the company stretch to nearly two hours for even minor changes.

To counter this, Ramani outlined a two-part strategy: adopting Vercel immediately to clear bottlenecks for AI teams while simultaneously building a faster in-house alternative, code-named “Nest,” designed specifically for apps developed in TypeScript. Her goal, according to the memo, is to slash deployment times from 99 minutes to under two.

The move is already showing results. By mid-September, at least 10 AI projects under Meta’s PAR group were running on Vercel, with updates rolling out in minutes instead of hours. Pairing Vercel with GitHub — Microsoft’s popular code-hosting and collaboration platform — has given teams a much-needed speed boost to build and test AI applications more efficiently.

Vercel, a fast-rising name in the cloud and AI app development space, specializes in building and deploying scalable web applications. It has attracted big-name clients like Netflix, Adobe, and Stripe. Interestingly, both Friedman and Alexandr Wang — Meta’s recently appointed Chief AI Officer — are investors in Vercel. The platform recently raised $300 million at a $9.3 billion valuation, underscoring its growing influence.

For Meta, the decision to lean on external services is part of a broader, high-stakes strategy to dominate the AI race. Zuckerberg has poured millions into Meta Superintelligence Labs, recruited top AI researchers with sky-high compensation packages, and reorganized teams to pursue Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — a vision of AI with human-like cognitive abilities.

But as the report suggests, ambition alone is not enough. Without the agility provided by faster development platforms, even a company of Meta’s scale risks being slowed down in the global race for AI breakthroughs. For now, Vercel and GitHub appear to be the lifeline Meta needs to keep its AI projects on track.