Meta strengthens its AI division with an elite research lab

Meta discreetly reorganized its recommendation team last fall to form an elite artificial intelligence research lab. This lab is led by Yang Song, a former executive from TikTok. This crucial division of Meta has recruited top talent from OpenAI, Google, and Amazon.

Meta is building an elite team of AI researchers to optimize the powerful algorithms that keep users engaged on Facebook and Instagram. According to job postings and LinkedIn profiles, the team, named MRS Research, is part of Meta's Recommendation Systems. These systems manage the news feeds in Meta's applications and have already attracted talent from TikTok and Amazon. MRS develops the algorithms that determine the types of content users see and works closely with the company's Ads division.

MRS Research was formed as part of an October reorganization within MRS to bring together relevant teams, a Meta spokesperson said. Such a team had already existed in various forms over the past few years, they added.

MRS Research will focus on long-term AI research goals and publishing cutting-edge research to advance Meta's recommendation engine, according to a job description. It is described as a "newly created organization" that brings together world-class AI researchers and engineers to "surpass" current AI recommendation systems.

This latest initiative from Meta demonstrates the company's intention to leverage AI to enhance its long-standing cash cows, such as advertising. Yang Song, Vice President of Recommendation Research at Meta, oversees this effort. He joined the company in November 2025 after leading user growth and recommendations at TikTok. At the time, he expressed on LinkedIn his enthusiasm for "revolutionizing" Meta's recommendation systems with AI.

Shortly after Song's arrival, Amazon AI researcher Lihong Li also joined the MRS Research unit, according to his LinkedIn profile. The MRS division recently brought on board former OpenAI researcher Xiaolong Wang and Google researcher Fei Sha, according to an academic paper and a LinkedIn post.

Meta declined to comment on specific AI talent within the company. Wang and Sha did not respond to requests for comment.

The tech giant has been conducting an aggressive AI talent recruitment campaign since the summer of 2025, when it announced the new Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), led by Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI. MRS is not part of MSL, the Meta spokesperson clarified.

Meta has also recently hired three AI researchers from the $12 billion startup Thinking Machines Lab, as previously reported by Business Insider.

Meta is fully committed to in-house AI, rebranding employees from another division as "AI builders" and encouraging staff to code new products. The company has long been exploring how to use new AI technologies to improve the algorithms behind its lucrative applications. For example, at the end of 2025, it launched an AI model that it claimed could enhance ad performance by delivering more relevant ads to users.