--- description: Find out why Mark Zuckerberg made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. title: TIME100 AI 2025: Mark Zuckerberg image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt939a87d1330f1eeb/6998c92e1500fbf994aa68a6/Mark-Zuckerberg.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 26, 2025 # Mark Zuckerberg Founder and CEO, Meta by [Harry Booth](/author/harry-booth/) ## Harry Booth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Booth is a reporter at TIME.  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Photo: David Zalubowski—AP) When Chinese rivals displaced Meta as the industry leader of open-weight AI, and Meta’s own Llama 4 failed to regain lost ground, Mark Zuckerberg reached for his checkbook. It started with a [$14.3 billion deal](https://time.com/7294699/meta-scale-ai-data-industry/ "undefined") to poach 28-year-old Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang and a handful of his top engineers—a move critics saw as a last-ditch effort to catch up. But that was only the beginning of Zuckerberg’s multibillion-dollar talent spree. The company reportedly wooed at least 50 researchers, many from rivals, before [freezing](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4 "undefined") hires in August. Those include investor and entrepreneur Nat Friedman, Safe Superintelligence CEO Daniel Gross, OpenAI researcher [Shengjia Zhao](https://x.com/alexandr%5Fwang/status/1948834974205182454 "undefined"), and [three members](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-hires-three-google-ai-researchers-worked-gold-medal-winning-model?rc=d8pcat "undefined") of the Google DeepMind team whose AI achieved gold medal performance at the prestigious International Mathematical Olympiad. Yet Zuckerberg has claimed the spending on talent is “quite small” compared with the fortune Meta is pouring into the raw computing power it believes is necessary to achieve superintelligence. “If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on compute,” Zuckerberg [told](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDDOy90V4Jo "undefined") The Information in July, “it really makes sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get the 50 or 70, or whatever it is, top researchers.” Zuckerberg’s strategy rests on the three pillars of modern AI development: vast reserves of data, massive computing power, and brilliant researchers to drive algorithmic progress. Meta has the first in spades—an ocean of data from its social media empire that it is [already leveraging](https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/12/24242789/meta-training-ai-models-facebook-instagram-photo-post-data "undefined") to train its AI models. Zuckerberg’s latest investments are an attempt to secure the other two. His goal is the creation of “[personal superintelligence](https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/ "undefined"),” which users can interact with through Meta’s [smart glasses](https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mark-zuckerberg-just-declared-war-on-the-iphone-30163885 "undefined") that can “see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day.” While Meta has been a flagbearer for open-weight AI—the practice of freely releasing model parameters so others can download and run them on their own machines—Zuckerberg has acknowledged that “novel safety concerns” posed by superintelligence mean the company must be “careful about what we choose to open source.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305856/mark-zuckerberg-ai/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305856/mark-zuckerberg-ai/"},"headline":"Mark Zuckerberg","datePublished":"2025-08-26T18:39:40.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:43.843Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305856/mark-zuckerberg-ai/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt939a87d1330f1eeb/6998c92e1500fbf994aa68a6/Mark-Zuckerberg.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Harry Booth","jobTitle":"Booth is a reporter at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/harry-booth/"}],"creator":"Harry Booth","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt939a87d1330f1eeb/6998c92e1500fbf994aa68a6/Mark-Zuckerberg.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305856/mark-zuckerberg-ai/","name":"Mark Zuckerberg"}}]}] ```