The Financial Times reports that Alexandr Wang is already being discussed as a possible future successor to Mark Zuckerberg. The FT presents that discussion as informal, but it reflects how quickly the 29-year-old has risen since taking charge of the company's Superintelligence Lab.
Wang arrived with Zuckerberg's strong backing and a mandate to repair Meta's position in the AI race. His early results were uneven. The FT says the first models released under his leadership failed to keep pace with rivals, before the recent launches of Muse and Muse Wonder changed the narrative around his tenure.
From Scale AI to Meta's top AI role
Wang founded the data-labeling company Scale AI in 2016 after leaving MIT. Scale went on to supply curated training data to major AI developers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and signed its first contract with Facebook in 2019.
After an underwhelming Meta model release prompted Zuckerberg to overhaul the company's AI organization, the two executives began discussing a deal in early 2025. Wang joined Meta through a $14.3 billion transaction involving Scale AI, then recruited prominent researchers from competing labs.
The scale of the investment raised eyebrows. Wang had not previously worked on training an AI model himself, according to the FT. Even so, the newspaper reports that Zuckerberg gave him unusual authority inside Meta and continued to back him through the team's slower start.
