Silicon Valley has a new power duo: Alexandr Wang, Scale AI’s 28-year-old co-founder, and Nat Friedman, the onetime CEO of GitHub. The pair are joining forces to lead a new vision within Meta to create superintelligence—a hypothetical AI system that is smarter than humans. Both reportedly declined offers to become OpenAI’s interim CEO during Sam Altman’s brief ouster in 2023.
In their new roles, Wang serves as chief AI officer, while Friedman is vice president of product and applied research. They’re a good fit for Meta, where the phrase “Move fast and break things” was coined, though is no longer an official motto. Both have expressed their preference for moving at speed to get things done. Their shared philosophy is already in motion, with the pair helping to rapidly assemble a star-studded team of researchers. Those include Friedman’s long-time co-investor Daniel Gross, along with many others from top rivals like Google DeepMind and OpenAI, just as Meta builds out computing infrastructure to bring its first 1GW cluster online as fast as possible. “It won't happen overnight,” Friedman posted to X on his first week at Meta, “but a few days in, I'm feeling confident that great things are ahead.”
In a policy paper co-authored shortly before he joined Meta, Wang wrote that superintelligent AI could be “the most precarious technological development since the nuclear bomb.” Now he and Friedman are helping build that technology inside a company with more than 3 billion users worldwide.