Mark Zuckerberg has appointed longtime lieutenant Vishal Shah to a key role in Meta’s artificial intelligence team, the latest in a string of executive shake-ups in the billionaire’s frantic AI push.
The reshuffle comes on the heels of the rushed release of its AI video service Vibes, which was quickly overtaken by OpenAI’s rival Sora app, despite Zuckerberg’s high-cost AI talent grab during the past few months.
Shah joined Meta a decade ago, running product at Instagram before moving in 2021 to head up the company’s efforts to create a ‘metaverse’, a virtual online world. In a memo obtained by the Financial Times, Meta’s head of AI product Nat Friedman announced that Shah was joining his team to lead product management. Shah will report to Friedman.
Friedman added that his team will now focus on building flagship AI products such as the Meta AI app, while divisions that work on individual apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp will be able to “generate AI experiences” by building on top of the company’s models.
“We can’t just be an AI team, we need to be an AI company,” Friedman said in Monday’s memo. “Vishal will be critical in standing up this collaboration model, leading the overall integration strategy, and ensuring scaled success.”
Monday’s shake-up, one of numerous leadership and organisational reshuffles at Meta over the past year, comes at a tumultuous moment for the $1.9tn company.
Last week Meta laid off around 600 staff from across its AI team, just months after embarking on a splashy AI hiring blitz intended to keep the Big Tech group at the forefront of the industry’s latest obsession.
Zuckerberg is racing to beat OpenAI and Google in developing models that he hopes will be smarter than humans and “personalised” for users of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other apps. Last week’s cuts were framed as necessary to speed up decision making, so that AI products can be deployed more quickly.
The appointment of a longtime Meta acolyte in the upper echelons of the AI team comes amid growing internal frustration with Friedman, who joined the company in June, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
Friedman, a popular Silicon Valley investor and former head of coding site GitHub, oversaw last month’s rollout of Vibes, a feed of short-form videos entirely generated by AI.
Vibes was rushed out in order to get ahead of rival OpenAI releasing a similar AI video service, Sora, three people said. To accelerate Vibes’ launch, Meta struck a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal paying the AI start-up Midjourney to use its AI image generation technology, several people said. Friedman is a longtime adviser to Midjourney.
Friedman then pushed staff to integrate Midjourney’s technology into the Meta AI app to power Vibes, when the app had originally been designed for Meta’s own video model, two people said. Meta also used technology from German AI start-up Black Forest Labs to bring Vibes to market faster.
While Vibes’ launch prompted a rise in Meta AI’s active user numbers and downloads, it was quickly overshadowed by a wave of excitement around Sora, which came out just days later.
“Nat has had a fast and impressive start, which is only validated by his ability to bring some of the best people in the company into his teams,” a Meta spokesperson said.
Zuckerberg has long tended to fill Meta’s upper ranks with long-standing allies. But over the summer, he made the rare move of appointing outside leaders to run his struggling AI efforts, following the lacklustre launch of its latest large language model Llama 4 in April.
The turnaround plan included hiring Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to head the broader AI team, known as Meta Superintelligence Labs, as well as its elite ‘TBD’ lab of generously paid AI researchers working on cutting-edge AI models.
Friedman was brought in under Wang in June to head up the AI product team. He had become a sounding board to Zuckerberg in recent years, several people said, joining the company in 2024 as an external adviser on AI and attending board meetings.
As part of the deal to recruit him, Meta also purchased 49 per cent of Friedman’s venture fund, resulting in a major windfall for the entrepreneur.
In Monday’s memo, Friedman praised Shah for solving “ambiguous technical problems” and noted his “deep relationships across Meta”.
Shah will also be tasked with helping integrate Meta’s AI technology into its augmented- and virtual-reality arm Reality Labs. That division is home to its metaverse development as well as its recent push into smart glasses, which Zuckerberg has described as vital to his all-in bet on “superintelligence”.
In 2021, Zuckerberg embarked on a costly push to build an avatar-filled metaverse, including renaming the company formerly known as Facebook to Meta. However, those efforts were hampered by technical difficulties and a lack of consumer appetite for its Quest VR headsets, giving way to his latest push to become an “AI leader”.
In an internal post about the appointment also seen by the FT, Shah said he planned “to remain very involved in building bridges between [Meta’s Superintelligence Labs] and [Reality Labs] that will enable us to shape how we deliver personal superintelligence to billions of people across all devices”.
The metaverse team will now be led by Gabriel Aul, currently the head of its social metaverse app Meta Horizon.
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