Mark Zuckerberg has appointed veteran Vishal Shah to lead product management for Meta’s AI initiatives. The announcement that came on Monday shows their push to compete with giants like Microsoft and emerging startups like OpenAI and Anthropic in building the next generation of AI models.
The appointment has come during a major reshuffle in the company where 600 jobs were cut from its Superintelligence Labs unit just last week. Meta called the layoffs a way to accelerate decision-making in AI product development.
Shah has already spent over a decade at Meta where he built up deep knowledge in product leadership. He led product management for Instagram for more than six years where he helped scale the platform to over a billion users. In 2021, he transitioned to vice president of Metaverse, where he headed Meta’s push into virtual reality and the company’s vision for an immersive 3D digital world.
That metaverse initiative, which prompted the company’s 2021 rebranding from Facebook to Meta, has since died down amid technical challenges and little to no consumer adoption. According to an internal memo obtained by the Financial Times, Shah will report directly to Nat Friedman, Meta’s head of AI product.
Friedman, a prominent Silicon Valley investor and former CEO of GitHub, joined Meta in June 2024 and has been instrumental in overseeing the rollout of flagship AI products like the Meta AI app and the AI-generated video service Vibes.
AI Across Meta’s Entire Ecosystem
In the memo, Friedman said that Shah will play a critical role in establishing collaboration models across Meta’s divisions and leading the overall AI integration strategy. “We can’t just be an AI team, we need to be an AI company,” said Friedman.
Under the new structure, Friedman’s team will concentrate on developing the Meta AI app, while individual app teams for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook will build AI-driven experiences on top of Meta’s core AI models. Shah’s responsibility will include coordinating these efforts and ensuring that AI capabilities are seamlessly woven into Meta’s product ecosystem.
Shah is also tasked with maintaining a close collaboration between Meta’s Superintelligence Labs and its Reality Labs division, the unit responsible for AR and VR development, including Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Zuckerberg has described these smart glasses as essential to his vision of delivering “personal superintelligence” to billions of users across multiple devices.
Meta plans to build large language models to directly compete with OpenAI and Google, and even dreams of creating AI that’s smarter than humans and tailored for billions of users across Meta’s family of apps.
The recent launch of Vibes, Meta’s AI-generated video feed, showed both the company’s ambition and execution challenges. Vibes was rushed to market ahead of OpenAI’s competing Sora app, which ultimately captured more attention and excitement upon its release just days later.
To accelerate Vibes’ development, Meta struck a multiyear, multibillion-dollar deal with AI startup Midjourney to license its image generation technology, and also utilized technology from German AI company Black Forest Labs. While Vibes initially drove increased downloads and active users for the Meta AI app, its launch was quickly overshadowed by Sora’s superior reception.
Shah’s recent internal communications at Meta reveal a push for a “5x leap in productivity” by embedding AI into daily workflows. He expects that by the end of the year, 80% of the metaverse team will actively use AI tools to streamline development and drive rapid prototyping.
Shah’s appointment has followed the same trend Mark Zuckerberg always follows. To put loyal and trusted internal leaders in charge of key initiatives. With a decade of product management expertise at Meta, Shah has established deep relationships with Meta’s major teams.
Meanwhile, Gabriel Aul, current head of Meta’s social metaverse app Meta Horizon, will assume leadership of the broader metaverse team which shows their continuation of virtual reality efforts even as organizational focus shifts toward AI. Meta’s spokesperson confirmed Shah’s new role but declined to provide additional details regarding the appointment process or timeline.
