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Greetings! Start your timer. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday unveiled the company’s new artificial intelligence organization—Meta Superintelligence Labs—replete with heavyweights from Silicon Valley. This new org is the product of a massive spending spree by Zuckerberg to snag the best AI talent possible in hopes of turning around Meta’s recent AI slump. The end result is a team that, without being too cynical, feels highly combustible. Don’t be surprised if at least one high profile departure occurs within a few months. Any group with a lot of big egos, working under intense pressure from a controlling chief executive, is going to have trouble staying together, of course. In this case, Zuckerberg appears desperate to get Meta’s AI efforts back on track. He had said in January that 2025 was “the year when Llama and open source become the most advanced and widely used AI models,” a prediction that hasn’t aged well, given Llama 4’s disastrous release. Zuckerberg’s solution, trying to hire any and everyone in AI, was high risk. Take Alexandr Wang, described today by Zuckerberg as Meta’s Chief AI Officer. Wang is a somewhat puzzling choice for the role given that Wang’s Scale AI startup didn’t develop models. Instead, Scale handled what my colleague Cory Weinberg described in a profile last year as the “AI grunt work” of hiring humans to label and train data using in model development (and which lately had been overtaken by a low profile rival). Cory’s profile of Wang is worth reading, painting a picture of a precocious, smart and extremely ambitious political operator—with a “polarizing reputation.” Subsequent reporting by Cory and Kalley Huang suggested Wang got the job because he had proved a savvy advisor to Zuckerberg on AI issues. Whatever the reason, whether his skills suit him for working in such a politically fraught environment is far from certain. What could complicate things further is the presence of two more experienced AI hands, Nat Friedman and (we expect) Daniel Gross, hired to work with Wang. Friedman has 25 years of experience in tech, including a stint as CEO of Github under Microsoft, which means he likely knows a lot more than Wang. As we’ve reported, Zuckerberg originally asked Friedman to run his AI effort but Friedman suggested Wang instead. That implies the two will get along fine but you never know how things develop on a day-to-day basis. Notably, Friedman had been expected to report to Wang but Zuckerberg’s memo on Monday described them as partners. As for Gross, a longtime AI investor who co-founded Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, he also has more experience than Wang. How he fits in the new org isn't entirely clear: he wasn’t mentioned in today’s memo, presumably because his exit from SSI is still being worked out. Add to these wrinkles the fact that Meta has hired a bunch of highly paid scientists from OpenAI, who will join existing staffers who are likely feeling a little disgruntled at how things have come about. Meta’s AI team has undergone repeated upheavals over the past couple of years. Meta could be described as the permanent revolution of AI. That likely won’t stop now. Oracle isn’t pulling any punches getting attention for its successes in winning cloud deals. In a securities filing on Monday, the company revealed that it had signed a large cloud services agreement that “is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting” in the fiscal year that ends in mid-2028. For context, that’s more than Oracle’s cloud services revenue in the fiscal year ending May. Oracle stock promptly jumped and the stock ended up 4% on the day. What’s amusing, though, is how Oracle announced it. The company could have simply put out a press release. But no, it filed a document with the Securities and Exchange Commission, under the headline “Regulation FD Disclosure,” which said that CEO Safra Catz “plans to meet with other Oracle colleagues later today” where she will reveal that “Oracle is off to a strong start” in its new fiscal year and had signed big cloud deals including the $30 billion one. Hang on a second: Regulation FD doesn’t require companies to make public disclosures of what the CEO has told colleagues. Instead, it requires companies to make public disclosure when a company “discloses material nonpublic information to certain individuals or entities—generally securities market professionals, such as stock analysts” or investors. If companies had to disclose whatever CEO told colleagues, they’d be making numerous FD disclosures all day long. We applaud Oracle’s willingness to do so in this case and wonder why the company hasn’t disclosed other, juicier details of Catz’s communication with colleagues? Since President Donald Trump said he’d have more news on a buyer group he’s found for TikTok “in two weeks,” we’ve been reminded of his liking of using the “two weeks” timeframe when it suits him. On that, this article from the New York Times earlier this month is enlightening. The bottom line is that no one should take the two-weeks thing seriously.
- A federal judge denied Apple’s motion to dismiss the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against the iPhone maker, ruling that the government’s lawsuit had “sufficiently alleged indirect evidence” showing that Apple has monopoly power in the smartphone market. Meanwhile, Apple is in talks with artificial intelligence leaders Anthropic and OpenAI to boost Siri, Apple’s languishing AI assistant, according to Bloomberg.
- Temu has resumed buying Meta Platforms and Google ads in the U.S., several months after the Chinese bargain site slashed virtually all of its digital ad spending in the country.
- Cato Networks, an Israel-based seller of network security software, announced Monday that it raised $359 million in funding at a valuation of more than $4.8 billion.
- Microsoft sales chief Judson Althoff will take a two month sabbatical beginning in July, a spokesperson said on Monday, and plans to return in September. Althoff’s leave comes as Microsoft is preparing to announce thousands of layoffs that will impact its sales division this week.
- Stablecoin issuer Circle, which went public in a blockbuster IPO early June, said Monday it has applied with a U.S. banking regulator to establish a national trust bank.
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