Meta’s New TBD Lab to Lead Development of Next Llama

Many of the artificial intelligence (AI) researchers who joined Meta as part of that company’s high-profile recruiting efforts are reportedly working in a new team called TBD Lab and leading the development of the next version of the large language model (LLM) Llama.

TBD Lab will work alongside other AI teams in Meta’s recently formed Superintelligence Labs group, helping with new model releases and AI agents, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Thursday (Aug. 7), citing unnamed sources and an internal company memo.

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

TBD Lab is overseen by Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who joined the company when it bought a $14 billion stake in his former startup, Scale AI, according to the report.

Wang wrote in a memo to employees, per the report: “Already in the past month, I’ve seen meaningful progress in each of these collaborations. This enables us to be more technically ambitious, parallelize across several separate efforts and ultimately achieve frontier results more quickly.”

The new team includes at least 18 AI researchers poached from OpenAI, a number from Google, and nine Meta employees transferred to TBD Lab from the company’s internal infrastructure teams, according to the report.

Meta has been pursuing an AI-focused hiring spree since at least early June, when it was reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was taking a hands-on approach to expanding the company’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team and was recruiting from a pool of AI researchers and engineers who met with him at his homes in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto, California.

It was reported Aug. 1 that industrywide competition for AI talent had led to unprecedented paychecks that in some cases exceeded those of NBA superstars.

These massive salaries reflect the stakes for tech giants like Meta that aim to be the first to develop AGI.

On June 30, it was reported that Zuckerberg announced in an internal memo that he was creating the Superintelligence Labs group that would be led by some of the company’s most recent hires and would include teams working on Meta’s foundation models, product, Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and the next generation of its models.

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