Zuckerberg Offers Big Bucks for AI Recruitment
The smartest AI researchers and engineers have spent the past few months getting hit up by one of the richest men in the world.
Mark Zuckerberg is spending his days firing off emails and WhatsApp messages to the sharpest minds in artificial intelligence in a frenzied effort to play catch-up. He has personally reached out to hundreds of researchers, scientists, infrastructure engineers, product stars and entrepreneurs to try to get them to join a new Superintelligence lab he is putting together.
Some of the people who have received the messages were so surprised they didn’t believe it was really Zuckerberg. One person assumed it was a hoax and didn’t respond for several days.
And Meta’s chief executive isn’t just sending them cold emails. Zuckerberg is also offering hundreds of millions of dollars, sums of money that would make them some of the most expensive hires the tech industry has ever seen. In at least one case, he discussed buying a startup outright.
While the financial incentives have been mouthwatering, some potential candidates have been hesitant to join Meta Platforms’ efforts because of the challenges that its AI efforts have faced this year, as well as a series of restructures that have left prospects uncertain about who is in charge of what, people familiar with their views said.
Meta’s struggles to develop cutting-edge artificial-intelligence technology reached a head in April, when critics accused the company of gaming a leaderboard to make a recently released AI model look better than it was. They also delayed the unveiling of a new, flagship AI model, raising questions about the company’s ability to continue advancing quickly in an industrywide AI arms race.
To remedy Meta’s AI malaise, Zuckerberg has become the company’s recruiter-in-
chief. He has tried to recruit OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and Bill Peebles, the co-creator of OpenAI’s Sora video generator, according to people familiar with the matter. Neither of them have joined.
Zuckerberg also has tried to recruit OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, according to people familiar with the matter.
Meta invested in Sutskever’s new AI startup called Safe Superintelligence earlier this year, and is in talks to hire Daniel Gross, SSI’s CEO, and Nat Friedman, a former GitHub CEO and Microsoft executive. As part of those discussions, Meta is offering to buy out portions of their venture fund. At Meta, the two would help develop new AI products.
Zuckerberg also held discussions with Perplexity and offered to buy the AI search startup, according to people familiar with the matter. The Information and Bloomberg previously reported details of Zuckerberg’s efforts.
Zuckerberg has offered $100 million packages to some people. He doled out $14 billion for a stake in AI startup Scale and its CEO Alexandr Wang, who is slated to run the new AI team that Zuckerberg is assembling. At that price, he essentially made the 28year-old one of the most lucrative hires in history.
Beyond the Scale deal and a few other hires, it is unclear how successful his efforts will ultimately be. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his best people remain at his company. OpenAI has given counteroffers to people Meta has tried to poach, promising them more money and scope in their jobs if they stay, according to a person familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, Altman has been on a spending spree of his own, paying billions for former Apple designer Jony Ive’s startup.
For those who have turned him down, Zuckerberg’s stated vision for his new AI superteam was also a concern.
He has tasked the team, which will consist of about 50 people, with achieving tremendous advances with AI models, including reaching a point of “superintelligence.” Some found the concept vague –or without a specific enough execution plan beyond the hiring blitz, the people said.
Potential hires and Meta employees working on its AI teams also pointed to a major point of tension: Meta’s chief AI scientist is a skeptic of the fundamental approach that his company and others are currently taking to advance AI technology.
Yann LeCun, whom Zuckerberg persuaded to come run a newly started AI research division at the time in 2013 using the same tactics, doesn’t believe that the large language models that the company and others in the industry are currently building will get the world to artificial intelligence that is smarter than human beings.
For Zuckerberg, the turning point came this past spring. After the model release fell flat, he sprung into action. These days, people inside the company say they have never seen him so focused on recruiting.
Zuckerberg is in a Whats-App chat called “Recruiting Party” with Ruta Singh, a Meta executive in charge of recruiting, and Janelle Gale, the company’s head of people. Zuckerberg is also in the weeds of wonky AI research papers, digging into the tech and trying to find out about who is actually building it. He also believes there is a flywheel effect to recruiting: By talking to the smartest person he can find, they will introduce him to the smartest people in their networks.
When the Recruiting Party chat finds people worth targeting, Zuckerberg wants to know their preferred method of communication, and he gets their attention by sending the first messages himself.
Zuckerberg has taken recruiting into his own hands, according to a person familiar with his approach, because he recognizes that it is where he can personally have the most leverage inside the company he founded.
