Mark Zuckerberg reportedly has made a list of top AI engineers and researchers around the world for a few months, and is preparing to offer a lucrative compensation package for potential employers seeking to poach AI talent from key competitors.
Silicon Valley has been talking for weeks about its meta CEO quest to attract top AI talent, including offering paid packages worth up to $100 million.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg personally reaches out to the candidates he likes.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, competes in searching for AI advantages with rivals such as Openai, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, invests billions of dollars in AI research and product development. Last month, a question was raised about the direction of Meta's AI development. That's after delaying the scheduled deployment of its flagship AI model, Behemoth.
Earlier this month, Meta paid $14 billion for Scale AI stakes, and its founder, 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, is responsible for the “Superintelligence team.”
Last year, Google purchased shareholders at Characher.ai. It was a chatbot service that allows users to personally talk to different AI personas, and bought it for $2.7 billion.
People on the “list” as Zuckerberg's Slate is known mainly in Silicon Valley include recent alumni of school top PhD programs such as the University of California, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. Many are currently employed by Meta's AI competitors, such as Openai and Google's Deepmind project, exchanging notes with each other about Meta's recruitment efforts.
A recruit, spoken personally to Zuckerberg, said his goal appears to be “a blood transfusion from the country's top AI lab.” A WhatsApp group chat called the “Recruit Party” was formed to allow Zuckerberg and at least two other senior meta-executives to speak through potential recruitment. According to the Wall Street Journal, Meta CEOs are trying to personally find candidates by looking at research papers.
Zuckerberg's practical recruitment efforts portrayed the rage of Openai CEO Sam Altman.
“I'm really pleased that none of our best people have decided to take that up, at least so far,” Altman said when he appeared on a capless podcast hosted by his brother Jack. “I think it's a lot of upfront, guaranteed comp strategies, and why you say you're going to get involved. I don't think it's going to set a great culture, like the extent to which they actually focus on it, not on the work and not on the mission.”
