Meta hires Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Luke Metz for superintelligence push

Meta hired Luke Metz, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, as part of an aggressive talent-acquisition campaign underpinning a multi-year plan to spend over $600 billion in the United States on AI superintelligence development. The hire continues a pattern of high-profile moves that includes acquiring a 49% stake in Scale AI and bringing on its CEO Alexandr Wang, signaling Meta's willingness to spend enormous sums on both talent and infrastructure to catch and surpass the frontier labs.

Metz's background at Thinking Machines Lab — one of the buzzy research startups founded by ex-OpenAI figures — makes him a notable get in the ongoing talent war, where a handful of researchers command outsized influence over frontier progress. The recruitment reflects Meta's strategy of assembling a superintelligence team by poaching from the very startups spun out of its competitors.

Context: this sits within Meta's broader spending surge — $130–$145B in 2026 capex, the Scale AI stake, and its dual open/closed model strategy (Muse Spark 1.2 open weights plus heavy Azure/OpenAI evaluation spend). Meta also released a developer tool enabling AI to automatically test Quest games, part of its 'building better shovels' developer-tooling focus. The superintelligence framing raises the stakes: Meta is explicitly organizing around a multi-year, multi-hundred-billion-dollar bet on surpassing today's frontier. Watch which other researchers Meta lands and whether the concentrated talent and capital translate into models that close the gap with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.