Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite move? Copy, hit, repeat. It made him one of the richest people on the planet. Now, he polish this game book for his biggest challenge: the AI race.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are in hiring and buying Spree, throwing eye-water sums at top AI researchers and startups in last pit effort to capture to Openai, Google and current rivals like Deepseek. It is a full-court press to convince the TE World Nican world and investors that Meta is still important in the AI race.
But here’s the twist: Zuckerberg attacks everyone else.
The moves
In the past few weeks, Zuckerberg AI -team has:
- Pocket talent as Alexander Wang (Scale Ai co-founder) to lead a new AI-superintelligent unit
- Offered $ 100 million+ packages to top researchers at Openai and Google (many said NO), according to Openai Director General.
- Trapped triggers or tried – from scale AI to Playai, which clones human voices for natural conversations
- Talked to AI Darlings as perplexity AI, Rybway, and even safe superintelligence
So far Meta has called several big names: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai (formerly Openai), and others like Trapit Bansal and Jack Rae, who left Google Deepmind. The company also reportedly tried (and failed) to attract high-profile AI explorers such as Noam Brown of Openai and Koray Kavukcuoglu of Google.
The mission of the unit? Build AI systems smarter than humans. Yes, really.
This is Zuckerberg’s version of the Thanos Snap: Collect the stones, wind his fingers, and yourself to the front of the AI line.
Throwing money to the future
Zuckerberg also throws money at startups. Meta invested $ 14.3 billion in Scale AI and negotiates to get Playai, which develops extremely human sound vocal agents. There were also feelings sent to the safe superintelligence of Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati’s new laboratory machines.
If it feels that Zuckerberg is panicing his way through the AI shop center before the shelves are empty, that’s because he is.
Meta AI’s AI assistant, Meta AI, does not currently match GPT-4O from Openai, Google 2.5 Pro, or R1 of Deepseek. These models can reason. Meta -people can answer. It’s like asking a child to drive a chess master.
And here’s the problem: Meta doesn’t just want to catch; It wants to jump. Zuckerberg knows he can’t wait years for homes. So he does what he has always done best: copy, buy and scale quickly.
It is the Facebook game again. Stories, coils, threads: all rifts on rival ideas. And now, ai.
The stakes
Why is it important?
Meta is back in the AI breed. Big time. Tools like Chatgpt, Gemini and Deepseek’s R1 can reason, plan and solve problems. Meta is ai? It still plays a trap, better at a small talk than to solve real problems.
What is Zuckerberg’s goal?
Build AI, who can think and reason, like the best systems of Openai and Google, and do it fast enough to stay important in the AI weapon race.
Why now?
The following Openai models are immediately opening source. This could delete the last advantage of Meta: its free, open AI models that developers love.
Zuckerberg declared 2025 AI’s year for Meta. It must be. The company’s advertising company is under pressure, threads flow, and Tiktok still eats Instagram’s lunch. Meanwhile, Openai flirts with becoming a complete social network, threatening Meta on his home lawn.
The new plan is to go all over “Rezoning Agents”, AI tools that can think of problems step by step, not just autocomplete your thoughts. These agents could operate business assistants, customer support bots or even future consumer programs.
But Meta needs one thing first: actual intelligence.
The criticism
Even Sam Altman from Openai rolls his eyes. In a recent podcast with his brother, he said that Meta’s strategy is obvious: “Copy Openai, try to capture talent, exterminate everyone.” But Altman warns that copying does not build a culture of innovation, and culture is what gains in the long run.
“I heard that Meta thinks of us as their biggest competitor,” Altman told his brother. But “their current AI efforts didn’t work as well as they hoped. And I respect to be aggressive and continue to try new things.”
He didn’t stop there.
“They started making these, like, giant offers to many people on our team, you know how $ 100 million signing bonuses,” Altman said, adding, “It’s crazy.” He accused Meta of “just trying to copy Openai, down to the UI errors,” Altman added.
Altman even called on Facebook’s addiction to attention hacking, saying Openai wants to be “the only Te Companynic company that doesn’t feel the opposite.” Translation: Meta tries to hack your brain; We try to help it.
New episode of uncapped with @La same. Enjoy 🤗 pic.twitter.com/2IXYT3B4GM
– Jack Altman (@jaltma) June 17, 2025
Our take
Zuckerberg has always been a quick follower, not a first mover. This worked for social media. And if the story is any guide, he will land some successes. He is great in absorbent traits, climbs quickly and bulldores rivals with pure strength. But the AI breed is different. This is an innovation. To date, Meta’s largest AI gameplay is its wallet. Is this enough to win a race, where originality is important as a fire -power remains visible.
Currently Zuckerberg is betting you can’t lose if you buy everyone who knows how to win. But in a world where AI forms power, privacy and future work, we all have an interest in whether these strategies actually produce safe, useful technology, or just more Hype.
