Meta’s superintelligence lab weighs a major strategy shift

Meta's newly formed superintelligence lab has discussed making a series of changes to the company’s artificial intelligence strategy, in what would amount to a major shakeup at the social media giant.

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Last week, a small group of top members of the lab, including Alexandr Wang, 28, Meta’s new chief AI officer, discussed abandoning the company’s most powerful open source AI model, called Behemoth, in favour of developing a closed model, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

For years, Meta has chosen to open-source its AI models, which means it makes the computer code public for other developers to build on. Closed models keep their underlying code private. Meta executives have long argued it is better for the technology to be built in public so that AI development will move faster and be accessible to more developers.

Any move towards a closed AI model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won plaudits from developers for open-sourcing its AI models, and one of its top AI executives, Yann LeCun, had said, “The platform that will win will be the open one.” This year, Chinese AI company DeepSeek released an advanced AI chatbot thanks in part to Meta’s open source code.