AI by Hand ✍️ Seminar: Frontier (Meta FAIR vs MSL)
Meta FAIR vs MSL
After delivering influential models like LLaMA and SAM, Meta’s AI research has been the subject of ongoing debate and speculation.
Instead of engaging with the headlines, this seminar takes a quieter approach: we let the papers speak for themselves—albeit only based on what Meta is willing to openly publish.
I’ll walk through three of the most recent publications from FAIR and three from MSL, using them to understand what Meta is actually investing in and where its AI research direction appears to be heading.
Guest Expert
Yichen Wang (Meta)
Facebook AI Research (FAIR)
Text-Guided Semantic Image Encoder https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20770 (11.25.2025)
Pixel Seal: Adversarial-only training for invisible image and video watermarking https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16874 (12.18.2025)
Safety Alignment https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.20806 (12.23.2025)
Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL)
REFRAG https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01092 (10.12.2025)
SAM 3 https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16719 (11.20.2025)
Dr. Zero https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07055 (1.11.2026)
Upcoming Seminars
2/12: Transformer
Guest Expert: Srijanie Dey, Tsavorite Scalable Intelligence
2/19: ClawdBot
Guest Expert: Val Andrei Fajardo, LlamaIndex Founding ML Engineer, Author of the Build a Multi-Agent System From Scratch
2/26: PPO->DPO->GRPO->???
Guest Expert: Cameron R. Wolfe, Netflix, Author of Deep Learning Focus
Previous Seminars
1/29/2026: 9 AI Eval Formulas
1/22/2026: TPU
1/15/2026: How Small Models Learn Tool Use from AWS
1/8/2026: Manifold-Constrained Hyper Connection (mHC) from DeepSeek
1/8:2026: Introduction to Generative AI
About the Seminar Series
In 2026, I’ve made a personal commitment to teach one live AI seminar every week by hand ✍️.
Foundation: intuition, math, and mental models of core AI concepts, for beginners.
Frontier: research papers, algorithm, and architectures used by frontier models, for advanced AI engineers and researchers.
Live attendance is free.
The recordings and Excel workbooks are available for members of the AI by Hand Academy.