AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, “Is that really Zuck?”As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new “superintelligence” AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit’s work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone. For those who do agree to hear his pitch (amazingly, not all of them do), Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they’ll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta’s products, and the money he’s prepared to invest in the infrastructure to support them. He makes clear that this new team will be empowered and sit with him at Meta’s headquarters, where I’m told the desks have already been rearranged for the incoming team.Most of the headlines so far have focused on the eye-popping compensation packages Zuckerberg is offering, some of which are well into the eight-figure range. As I’ve covered before, hiring the best AI researcher is like hiring a star basketball player: there are very few of them, and you have to pay up. Case in point: Zuckerberg basically just paid 14 Instagrams to hire away Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It’s easily the most expensive hire of all time, dwarfing the billions that Google spent to rehire Noam Shazeer and his core team from Character.AI (a deal Zuckerberg passed on). “Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in his note to employees this week. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.”Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree is already starting to rattle his competitors. The day before his offer deadline for some senior OpenAI employees, Sam Altman dropped an essay proclaiming that “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.” And after Zuckerberg tried to hire DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, he was given a larger SVP title and now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. I expect Wang to have the title of “chief AI officer” at Meta when the new lab is announced. Jack Rae, a principal researcher from DeepMind who has signed on, will lead pre-training. Meta certainly needs a reset. According to my sources, Llama has fallen so far behind that Meta’s product teams have recently discussed using AI models from other companies (although that is highly unlikely to happen). Meta’s internal coding tool for engineers, however, is already using Claude. While Meta’s existing AI researchers have good reason to be looking over their shoulders, Zuckerberg’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale is making many longtime employees, or Scaliens, quite wealthy. They were popping champagne in the office this morning. Then, Wang held his last all-hands meeting to say goodbye and cried. He didn’t mention what he would be doing at Meta. I expect his new team will be unveiled within the next few weeks after Zuckerberg gets a critical number of members to officially sign on. Tim Cook. Getty Images / The VergeApple’s AI problemApple is accustomed to being on top of the tech industry, and for good reason: the company has enjoyed a nearly unrivaled run of dominance. After spending time at Apple HQ this week for WWDC, I’m not sure that its leaders appreciate the meteorite that is heading their way. The hubris they display suggests they don’t understand how AI is fundamentally changing how people use and build software.Heading into the keynote on Monday, everyone knew not to expect the revamped Siri that had been promised the previous year. Apple, to its credit, acknowledged that it dropped the ball there, and it sounds like a large language model rebuild of Siri is very much underway and coming in 2026.The AI industry moves much faster than Apple’s release schedule, though. By the time Siri is perhaps good enough to keep pace, it will have to contend with the lock-in that OpenAI and others are building through their memory features. Apple and OpenAI are currently partners, but both companies want to ultimately control the interface for interacting with AI, which puts them on a collision course. Apple’s decision to let developers use its own, on-device foundational models for free in their apps sounds strategically smart, but unfortunately, the models look far from leading. Apple ran its own benchmarks, which aren’t impressive, and has confirmed a measly context window of 4,096 tokens. It’s also saying that the models will be updated alongside its operating systems — a snail’s pace compared to how quickly AI companies move. I’d be surprised if any serious developers use these Apple models, although I can see them being helpful to indie devs who are just getting started and don’t want to spend on the leading cloud models. I don’t think most people care about the privacy angle that Apple is claiming as a differentiator; they are already sharing their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and other assistants. Some of the new Apple Intelligence features I demoed this week were impressive, such as live language translation for calls. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the company is heavily leaning on its ChatGPT partnership as a stopgap until Apple Intelligence and Siri are both where they need to be. AI probably isn’t a near-term risk to Apple’s business. No one has shipped anything close to the contextually aware Siri that was demoed at last year’s WWDC. People will continue to buy Apple hardware for a long time, even after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announce their first AI device for ChatGPT next year. AR glasses aren’t going mainstream anytime soon either, although we can expect to see more eyewear from Meta, Google, and Snap over the coming year. In aggregate, these AI-powered devices could begin to siphon away engagement from the iPhone, but I don’t see people fully replacing their smartphones for a long time. The bigger question after this week is whether Apple has what it takes to rise to the occasion and culturally reset itself for the AI era. I would have loved to hear Tim Cook address this issue directly, but the only interview he did for WWDC was a cover story in Variety about the company’s new F1 movie.ElsewhereAI agents are coming. I recently caught up with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi ahead of his company’s annual developer conference this week in San Francisco. Given Databricks’ position, he has a unique, bird’s-eye view of where things are headed for AI. He doesn’t envision a near-term future where AI agents completely automate real-world tasks, but he does predict a wave of startups over the next year that will come close to completing actions in areas such as travel booking. He thinks humans will need (and want) to approve what an agent does before it goes off and completes a task. “We have most of the airplanes flying automated, and we still want pilots in there.”Buyouts are the new normal at Google. That much is clear after this week’s rollout of the “voluntary exit program” in core engineering, the Search organization, and some other divisions. In his internal memo, Search SVP Nick Fox was clear that management thinks buyouts have been successful in other parts of the company that have tried them. In a separate memo I saw, engineering exec Jen Fitzpatrick called the buyouts an “opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.” Google appears to be attempting a cultural reset, which will be a challenging task for a company of its size. We’ll see if it can pull it off. Evan Spiegel wants help with AR glasses. I doubt that his announcement that consumer glasses are coming next year was solely aimed at AR developers. Telegraphing the plan and announcing that Snap has spent $3 billion on hardware to date feels more aimed at potential partners that want to make a bigger glasses play, such as Google. A strategic investment could help insulate Snap from the pain of the stock market. A full acquisition may not be off the table, either. When he was recently asked if he’d be open to a sale, Spiegel didn’t shut it down like he always has, but instead said he’d “consider anything” that helps the company “create the next computing platform.”Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’re an AI researcher fielding a juicy job offer. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.See More:

Meta is reportedly set to invest $15 billion to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, in a deal that would make Scale CEO Alexandr Wang head of the tech giant’s new AI unit dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence.”Scale AI, founded in 2016, is a leading data annotation firm that hires workers around the world to label or create the data that is used to train AI systems.The deal is expected to greatly enrich Wang and many of his colleagues with equity in Scale AI; Wang, already a billionaire, would see his wealth grow even further. For Meta, it would breathe new life into the company’s flagging attempts to compete at the “frontier” of AI against OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.However, Scale’s contract workers, many of whom earn just dollars per day via a subsidiary called RemoTasks, are unlikely to benefit at all from the deal, according to sociologists who study the sector. Typically data workers are not formally employed, and are instead paid for the tasks they complete. Those tasks can include labeling the contents of images, answering questions, or rating which of two chatbots’ answers are better, in order to teach AI systems to better comply with human preferences.(TIME has a content partnership with Scale AI.)“I expect few if any Scale annotators will see any upside at all,” says Callum Cant, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex, U.K., who studies gig work platforms. “It would be very surprising to see some kind of feed-through. Most of these people don’t have a stake in ownership of the company.”Many of those workers already suffer from low pay and poor working conditions. In a recent report by Oxford University’s Internet Institute, the Scale subsidiary RemoTasks failed to meet basic standards for fair pay, fair contracts, fair management, and fair worker representation.Advertisement“A key part of Scale’s value lies in its data work services performed by hundreds of thousands of underpaid and poorly protected workers,” says Jonas Valente, an Oxford researcher who worked on the report. “The company remains far from safeguarding basic standards of fair work, despite limited efforts to improve its practices.”The Meta deal is unlikely to change that. “Unfortunately, the increasing profits of many digital labor platforms and their primary companies, such as the case of Scale, do not translate into better conditions for [workers],” Valente says.A Scale AI spokesperson declined to comment for this story. “We're proud of the flexible earning opportunities offered through our platforms,” the company said in a statement to TechCrunch in May. Meta’s investment also calls into question whether Scale AI will continue supplying data to OpenAI and Google, two of its major clients. In the increasingly competitive AI landscape, observers say Meta may see value in cutting off its rivals from annotated data — an essential means of making AI systems smarter. Advertisement“By buying up access to Scale AI, could Meta deny access to that platform and that avenue for data annotation by other competitors?” says Cant. “It depends entirely on Meta’s strategy.”If that were to happen, Cant says, it could put downward pressure on the wages and tasks available to workers, many of whom already struggle to make ends meet with data work.A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on this story.

Breakdown & Showreels The Last of Us – Season 2: VFX Breakdown by RISE By Vincent Frei - 13/06/2025 From the icy surroundings of Jackson to the fortified stadium in Seattle… RISE brings unforgettable visuals to The Last of Us Season 2 — including one pivotal moment that fans will be talking about for years! WANT TO KNOW MORE?RISE: Dedicated page about The Last of Us – Season 2 on RISE website.Alex Wang & Fiona Campbell Westgate: Here’s my interview of Alex Wang (Production VFX Supervisor) & Fiona Campbell Westgate (Production VFX Producer). © Vincent Frei – The Art of VFX – 2025

In Brief Posted: 11:46 AM PDT · June 14, 2025 Image Credits:Matthias Balk/picture alliance / Getty Images Google reportedly plans to cut ties with Scale AI Meta’s big investment in Scale AI may be giving some of the startup’s customers pause. Reuters reports that Google had planned to pay Scale $200 million this year but is now having conversations with its competitors and planning to cut ties. Microsoft is also reportedly looking to pull back, and OpenAI supposedly made a similar decision months ago, although its CFO said the company will continue working with Scale as one of many vendors. Scale’s customers include self-driving car companies and the U.S. government, but Reuters says its biggest clients are generative AI companies seeking access to workers with specialized knowledge who can annotate data to train models. Google declined to comment on the report. A Scale spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s relationship with Google, but he told TechCrunch that Scale’s business remains strong, and that it will continue to operate as an independent company that safeguards its customers’ data. Earlier reports suggest that Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale for a 49% stake in the company, with Scale CEO Alexandr Wang joining Meta to lead the company’s efforts to develop “superintelligence.” Topics AI, Google, Meta, Scale AI

Meta is looking to up its weakening AI game with a key talent grab. Following days of speculation, the social media giant has confirmed that Scale AI’s founder and CEO, Alexandr Wang, is joining Meta to work on its AI efforts. Meta will invest $14.3 billion in Scale AI as part of the deal, and will have a 49% stake in the AI startup, which specializes in data labeling and model evaluation services. Other key Scale employees will also move over to Meta, while CSO Jason Droege will step in as Scale’s interim CEO. This move comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-led company goes all-in on building a new research lab focused on “superintelligence,” the next step beyond artificial general intelligence (AGI). The arrangement also reflects a growing trend in big tech, where industry giants are buying companies without really buying them — what’s increasingly being referred to as “acqui-hiring.” It involves recruiting key personnel from a company, licensing its technology, and selling its products, but leaving it as a private entity. “This is fundamentally a massive ‘acqui-hire’ play disguised as a strategic investment,” said Wyatt Mayham, lead AI consultant at Northwest AI Consulting. “While Meta gets Scale’s data infrastructure, the real prize is Wang joining Meta to lead their superintelligence lab. At the $14.3 billion price tag, this might be the most expensive individual talent acquisition in tech history.” Closing gaps with competitors Meta has struggled to keep up with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other key competitors in the AI race, recently even delaying the launch of its new flagship model, Behemoth, purportedly due to internal concerns about its performance. It has also seen the departure of several of its top researchers.  “It’s not really a secret at this point that Meta’s Llama 4 models have had significant performance issues,” Mayham said. “Zuck is essentially betting that Wang’s track record building AI infrastructure can solve Meta’s alignment and model quality problems faster than internal development.” And, he added, Scale’s enterprise-grade human feedback loops are exactly what Meta’s Llama models need to compete with ChatGPT and Claude on reliability and task-following. Data quality, a key focus for Wang, is a big factor in solving those performance problems. He wrote in a note to Scale employees on Thursday, later posted on X (formerly Twitter), that when he founded Scale AI in 2016 amidst some of the early AI breakthroughs, “it was clear even then that data was the lifeblood of AI systems, and that was the inspiration behind starting Scale.” But despite Meta’s huge investment, Scale AI is underscoring its commitment to sovereignty: “Scale remains an independent leader in AI, committed to providing industry-leading AI solutions and safeguarding customer data,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Scale will continue to partner with leading AI labs, multinational enterprises, and governments to deliver expert data and technology solutions through every phase of AI’s evolution.” Allowing big tech to side-step notification But while it’s only just been inked, the high-profile deal is already raising some eyebrows. According to experts, arrangements like these allow tech companies to acquire top talent and key technologies in a side-stepping manner, thus avoiding regulatory notification requirements. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires mergers and acquisitions totaling more than $126 million be reported in advance. Licensing deals or the mass hiring-away of a company’s employees don’t have this requirement. This allows companies to move more quickly, as they don’t have to undergo the lengthy federal review process. Microsoft’s deal with Inflection AI is probably one of the highest-profile examples of the “acqui-hiring” trend. In March 2024, the tech giant paid the startup $650 million in licensing fees and hired much of its team, including co-founders Mustafa Suleyman (now CEO of Microsoft AI) and Karén Simonyan (chief scientist of Microsoft AI). Similarly, last year Amazon hired more than 50% of Adept AI’s key personnel, including its CEO, to focus on AGI. Google also inked a licensing agreement with Character AI and hired a majority of its founders and researchers. However, regulators have caught on, with the FTC launching inquiries into both the Microsoft-Inflection and Amazon-Adept deals, and the US Justice Department (DOJ) analyzing Google-Character AI. Reflecting ‘desperation’ in the AI industry Meta’s decision to go forward with this arrangement anyway, despite that dicey backdrop, seems to indicate how anxious the company is to keep up in the AI race. “The most interesting piece of this all is the timing,” said Mayham. “It reflects broader industry desperation. Tech giants are increasingly buying parts of promising AI startups to secure key talent without acquiring full companies, following similar patterns with Microsoft-Inflection and Google-Character AI.” However, the regulatory risks are “real but nuanced,” he noted. Meta’s acquisition could face scrutiny from antitrust regulators, particularly as the company is involved in an ongoing FTC lawsuit over its Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. While the 49% ownership position appears designed to avoid triggering automatic thresholds, US regulatory bodies like the FTC and DOJ can review minority stake acquisitions under the Clayton Antitrust Act if they seem to threaten competition. Perhaps more importantly, Meta is not considered a leader in AGI development and is trailing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, meaning regulators may not consider the deal all that concerning (yet). All told, the arrangement certainly signals Meta’s recognition that the AI race has shifted from a compute and model size competition to a data quality and alignment battle, Mayham noted. “I think the [gist] of this is that Zuck’s biggest bet is that talent and data infrastructure matter more than raw compute power in the AI race,” he said. “The regulatory risk is manageable given Meta’s trailing position, but the acqui-hire premium shows how expensive top AI talent has become.”