Meta and OpenAI, two titans in the artificial intelligence arms race, are accelerating their efforts to shape the future of technology—and perhaps humanity itself. In a year marked by breakneck innovation, high-stakes investments, and philosophical debate, both companies have revealed new strategies and bold predictions that underscore the urgency and promise of AI’s next chapter.
According to Business Insider, Meta’s pivot is nothing short of dramatic. In late September 2025, executives at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) made the call to break from the company’s own lumbering internal engineering systems, opting instead for nimble, external tools like Vercel and GitHub. The goal? To turbocharge AI development and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google. Meta’s internal systems, designed for the colossal task of serving billions of users, had become a bottleneck for the smaller, fast-moving teams tasked with inventing the future.
“Deploying changes takes too long (hours vs. minutes), and the overall tech stack is not conducive to vibe coding,” wrote Aparna Ramani, head of infrastructure for MSL, in a late September memo obtained by Business Insider. The phrase “vibe coding”—where AI tools themselves help write code—has become a buzzword among engineers. Ramani’s memo laid out a plan to slash deployment times from a sluggish 99 minutes to just two minutes or less, a shift that could make all the difference in the high-speed world of AI research.
The first step in this overhaul involves adopting Vercel, a platform that’s rapidly become a darling in the web and AI app development space. Vercel, which raised $300 million at a $9.3 billion valuation in September 2025, counts Netflix, Adobe, and Stripe among its clients and boasts investors such as Accel, Singapore's GIC, BlackRock, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst. Ramani noted that Vercel “is widely used and can unblock MSL immediately,” and that the company is willing to work with Meta to address data and hosting restrictions. By mid-September, Meta was already running 10 projects on Vercel and GitHub, with updates now rolling out in minutes instead of hours.
But Meta isn’t putting all its eggs in one basket. The company is also building an internal platform called “Nest,” designed to host apps built with TypeScript—a programming language that’s become an industry standard. Ramani’s memo promised a working prototype of Nest within two weeks, with the long-term vision of making it the “de facto” option for Meta’s AI teams. Vercel, meanwhile, will serve as a crucial “escape valve” for projects that fall outside Nest’s capabilities.
The Product and Applied Research (PAR) group at MSL, led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, is at the heart of this transformation. Friedman and Alexandr Wang, Meta’s newly appointed chief AI officer, are both investors in Vercel—further testament to the tight-knit, fast-evolving AI ecosystem. The memos obtained by Business Insider offer a rare peek behind the curtain, revealing how Meta is sidestepping the limitations of its legacy infrastructure in favor of mainstream developer tools.
Meta’s willingness to turn to outside technology when its own tools fall short is not new. Earlier in 2025, the company rolled out an internal coding assistant called Devmate, which leverages AI models from competitors like Anthropic’s Claude after employees reported that Meta’s homegrown Llama AI model struggled with complex tasks. Similarly, Meta’s new “Vibes” feature, which generates AI images, relies on Midjourney’s technology rather than Meta’s own. Friedman, interestingly, is also an advisor to Midjourney.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of a massive investment in AI talent and resources. Over the past year, Meta has reorganized its AI work under the MSL banner and lured top researchers with nine-figure pay packages. The stakes are high, and the company’s leadership is making it clear that speed and flexibility are now the order of the day.
While Meta races to retool its development process, OpenAI is making headlines with bold predictions about the future of artificial intelligence. On October 3, 2025, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, told Business Insider that he expects AI to surpass human intelligence within the next five years. “I would certainly say that by the end of this decade, by 2030, if we don’t have extraordinarily capable models that do things that we ourselves cannot do, I’d be very surprised,” Altman said.
Altman pointed to the scientific potential of AI as a key milestone. “In another couple of years, it will become very plausible for AI to make, for example, scientific discoveries that humans cannot make on their own. To me, that’ll start to feel like something we could properly call superintelligence,” he explained.
Inevitably, the specter of AI superintelligence raises existential questions. Will these machines treat us as mere ants, or could they become benevolent guides? Altman referenced his cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s hope that “the way that an artificial general intelligence would treat humanity, or all AGIs would treat humanity, is like a loving parent.” He cautioned against anthropomorphizing AGI, but stressed the importance of aligning AI with human values. “I believe that this tool will be enormously capable. Even if it has no intentionality, asking it to do something could have consequences we don’t understand. So, it is very important that we align it with human values. I don’t think it’ll treat humans like ants.”
OpenAI’s journey has not been without missteps. “We’ve obviously made some mistakes, as we understand that with this new technology, we’ll make more in the future. But overall, I’m extremely proud of our team’s track record on figuring out how to make these services safe, broadly beneficial, and widely distributed,” Altman told Business Insider.
The rapid evolution of AI will have profound consequences for the workforce. Altman predicted that “30 to 40% of the tasks that happen in the economy today get done by AI in the not very distant future,” leading to the disappearance of some jobs and the creation of entirely new ones. He encouraged workers to focus on meta-skills—learning how to learn, adaptability, resilience, understanding people’s needs, and creativity. “I’m confident that people will still be the center of the story for each other,” he said. “Anything in that world will be great. I’m also confident that human desire for new stuff, desire to be useful to other people, and desire to express our creativity are all limitless.”
As Meta and OpenAI forge ahead, their approaches reveal not just a technological rivalry but a philosophical one. Meta’s race to streamline its development tools reflects a belief that speed and experimentation will unlock the next wave of breakthroughs. OpenAI’s focus on alignment, safety, and human values suggests a more cautious optimism about the future. Both, however, agree on one thing: the world is on the cusp of a transformation that will test the limits of human ingenuity—and perhaps redefine what it means to be human.
