Meta only escalated the AI talent war with Openai.
Shengjia Zhao, co-creator of ChatGpt and former lead scientist at Openai, joined Meta as the chief scientist at Superintelligence Labs.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Zhao's appointment in a social media post on Friday, calling him a “pioneer” in a field that has already driven several major AI breakthroughs.
Zhao previously helped build GPT-4 and led the synthetic data initiative at Openai. According to the post, Zhao will work directly with Zuckerberg and newly appointed head of AI, Scale AI, founder and CEO Alexandr Wang.
New recruits occur during Zuckerberg's multi-billion-dollar AI spending range. This includes investing in a $15 billion scale AI and creating a new division, Meta Superintelligence Labs, focusing on basic models and next-generation research.
In addition to Zhao, the company invited three researchers who built Openai's Zurich office, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai. The Superintelligence Labs team currently consists of a lineup of names previously seen on Openai, Anthropic, and Google.
But the war for AI talent is not over.
Databricks VP Naveen Rao estimates that less than 1,000 people around the world can build frontier AI models in competition with “searching for Lebron James.”
Large wage package cashless companies are turning their eyes to hackathons and computing power as incentives. Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity Meta researchers said he tried to poach. I told the company to ask again when there was “10,000 H100.”
AI Tech Workers previously told Business Insider that Meta's Mark Zuckerberg sends emails directly to prospects and hosts AI researchers at home.
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Tech executives have mixed feelings about Meta's poaching efforts.
“The meta isn't on the frontier now. Maybe they can get back there,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google Deepmind, in an episode of “Lex Fridman Podcast,” which aired Friday.
“It's probably rational to see what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something,” Hassavis added.
On the July 18 episode of the podcast “Jack Altman and Uncapped,” Openai CEO Sam Altman criticised some of Meta's “giant offers” against company employees, calling the strategy “crazy.”
“The extent to which they focus on money rather than missions, not on work,” Sam Altman said. “I don't think that's going to set a great culture.”
Meta and Openai did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
