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-and-capital campaign tied to a three-year plan to spend more than $600 billion in the U.S. on AI, with superintelligence as the stated goal. The hire continues a pattern that includes Meta's roughly 49% stake in Scale AI and recruitment of Alexandr Wang.

The spending scale is staggering and central to the story: alongside Metz's hire, Meta has raised 2026 capex guidance toward $130-145 billion, poured money into datacenters (including closed-loop liquid cooling detailed this week), automated ad tools, agentic assistants, and AI smart glasses. Meta also released Muse Glimmer, a 30B open-weight agentic model, and priced Muse Image at $0.01/image for production.

The superintelligence framing invites scrutiny, especially against a widely shared r/artificial thread — 'Mark Zuckerberg had a bold plan to replace Meta staff with AI. Here's how it imploded' — signaling skepticism that Meta's grand AI ambitions translate cleanly into execution. Talent churn and reorganizations have dogged the effort.

Strategically, poaching a Thinking Machines co-founder is a signal of intent in the frontier-lab talent war, where a handful of researchers command outsized leverage. Watch for what team Metz leads, whether the $600B figure holds up as a real commitment versus aspirational framing, and how Meta's open-weight releases (Muse Glimmer) balance against its closed superintelligence race.