What is Meta's new super-intelligence? And what acqui-hire, the new big tech term, means

Meta closed the second quarter of 2025 on a positive note, exceeding analysts' expectations: revenues increased by 22%, reaching $47.5 billion, while net profit rose by 36%, surpassing $18 billion. Following the announcement, Meta shares rose by over 10%. During the earnings presentation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the opportunity to once again highlight a technological solution he describes as a «super-intelligence». The Facebook founder explained that the company's current goal is to design a form of artificial intelligence truly intended to serve people, in contrast to the approaches of other tech firms which he believes are more centralized and less transparent. «There was nothing truly clear in what [Zuckerberg] stated,» notes the magazine Deadline, suggesting that Meta may mostly be trying to regain ground in the AI sector through highly ambitious - albeit still vague - announcements.

Meta has clearly fallen behind other major market players such as OpenAI and Google. This past May, for instance, Meta was forced to postpone the launch of its new AI model, Behemoth, due to its poor performance, which disappointed many observers. For this reason, the company recently acquired 49% of Scale AI, a company that manages the vast amounts of data needed to train AI systems - an investment that cost Meta over $14 billion. According to the agreement, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang (born in 1997) will lead Meta’s AI division, focusing directly on the development of the much-hyped super-intelligence. This operation aligns with a strategic model increasingly common in the tech sector, known as «acqui-hire», a term combining «acquisition» and «hire,» which consists in buying another company mainly to integrate the talent among its employees into one's own team. Google recently did the same, investing $2.4 billion to acquire Windsurf, a company that developed an AI capable of generating computer code. The two co-founders then moved on to work at Google DeepMind, the division dedicated to Google's AI projects.

Such operations, however, are evidently very expensive. For this reason, some Meta shareholders had previously expressed concerns about the company’s excessive financial commitment to artificial intelligence, especially in relation to its limited results. Nevertheless, Zuckerberg has not hidden that Meta’s investments in this field could increase in 2026. According to the Economist, the Facebook founder seems willing to spend over a billion dollars to secure the most talented individuals in the sector - most of whom currently work for OpenAI and Google. However, Zuckerberg is managing to lure some of these developers and researchers away from the competition by offering extremely high salaries, even by industry standards. The Wall Street Journal writes that in some cases, salaries may even reach $100 million a year. U.S. magazine The Information reports that to avoid losing key staff, OpenAI will invest a total of $1.5 billion in additional compensation in 2025. For Q3 2025, Meta expects revenues between $47 and $50 billion. Although Zuckerberg’s vision remains unclear, it is clearly ambitious (perhaps too ambitious?), suggesting that his company aims to play a central role in the AI space - not in the coming months, but in the coming years. Will the company’s massive financial efforts end up like those devoted to the Metaverse?