Mark Zuckerberg has restructured Meta's AI leadership, stripping power from Alexandr Wang, the company's highest-paid executive. The move comes nine months after Wang's $14 billion hiring to lead Meta Superintelligence Labs, signaling Zuckerberg's loss of confidence in the 28-year-old data-labeling entrepreneur. The restructuring follows internal clashes over AI development strategy and vision.

Wang's sidelining culminated with Meta creating a new applied artificial-intelligence engineering organization led by veteran executive Maher Saba. Saba now reports directly to CTO Andrew Bosworth, bypassing Wang entirely. The new team, structured with a flat hierarchy of up to 50 individual contributors per manager, focuses on building a data engine to accelerate and improve Meta's AI models.

The internal rift stemmed from conflicting visions between Wang and Zuckerberg's lieutenants Chris Cox and Andrew Bosworth. While Wang pushed for catching up with OpenAI and Google's frontier models, Cox and Bosworth advocated for AI development centered on Instagram and Facebook data for consumer-facing products. The managerial crisis peaked when Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun walked out after refusing to work under Wang's command.