Kamal Ghorui
Mark Zuckerberg has literally moved his desk to sit alongside Meta’s AI researchers—and by all accounts, he’s not just watching from the sidelines. The Meta CEO is deep in the code himself, signaling just how seriously the company is treating this moment in the AI race. Meta President Dina Powell McCormick revealed this detail at Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, offering one of the more vivid glimpses into Zuckerberg‘s personal involvement in the company’s AI push.
Zuckerberg now sits alongside Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman
“Mark has actually moved his desk and is seated in the AI lab with Alex Wang and Nat Friedman, and he’s coding all day long,” McCormick said. Alexandr Wang is the co-founder of Scale AI, whom Meta recruited as part of a roughly $15 billion investment to build out its new Superintelligence Labs division. Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO, joined Meta in July to help lead the company’s AI product development.McCormick joked that the AI team’s reaction to having their boss parked next to them is somewhere between flattering and mildly exhausting. “On the one hand, they are sort of like, ‘Oh great, more advice from you Mark, as you’re coding,'” she said, laughing.But she struck a more serious note when explaining the reasoning. “I think he feels so strongly that he has to understand it at that level to really think about how to make our model the strongest it can be,” McCormick said.This isn’t just symbolic leadership by proximity. The Financial Times reported that Zuckerberg has been spending five to ten hours per week coding on different AI projects and reviewing the work of his team.
Meta’s Superintelligence Labs is trying to close the gap with OpenAI and Google
The desk move reflects the scale of competitive pressure Meta is under. Externally, the company has been viewed as falling behind fellow hyperscalers in the generative AI race—a perception the Superintelligence Labs team is actively working to change.There are early signs the investment is working. Meta’s stock jumped 8% following the release of Muse Spark, the first AI model produced by Superintelligence Labs. Zuckerberg called it the division’s “first milestone.”McCormick, who joined Meta as President and Vice Chairman in January 2026 after stints at Goldman Sachs and as Deputy National Security Advisor, also noted the company’s pace of movement. “Silicon Valley—or at least I’ve seen Meta—move much, much more quickly than when I worked in government or even on Wall Street,” she said.Earlier this year, Zuckerberg told investors that “2026 is going to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work,” and it appears he intends to be right in the middle of making that happen—one commit at a time.
