In April, Mark Zuckerberg鈥檚 lofty plans for the future of artificial intelligence crashed into reality.
Weeks earlier, the 41-year-old chief executive of Meta had publicly boasted that his company鈥檚 new A.I. model, which would power the latest chatbots and other cutting-edge experiments, would be a 鈥渂east.鈥 Internally, Mr. Zuckerberg told employees that he wanted it to rival the A.I. systems of competitors like OpenAI and be able to drive features such as voice-powered chatbots, people who spoke with him said.
But at Meta鈥檚 A.I. conference that month, the new A.I. model did not perform as well as those of rivals. Features like voice interactions were not ready. Many developers, who attended the event with high expectations, left underwhelmed.
Mr. Zuckerberg knew Meta was falling behind in A.I., people close to him said, which was unacceptable. He began strategizing in a WhatsApp group with top executives, including Chris Cox, Meta鈥檚 head of product, and Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer, about what to do.