Nothing says talent war like a $100 million job offer. Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring blitz for AI’s most revered scientists, sending them cold emails and offering them roles in his new Superintelligence Labs division whose goal is nothing less than to build artificial-intelligence software that’s smarter than humans.
You might wonder why the Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive officer, whose company already prints money from clever ad targeting and recommendation software, needs to build god-like AI, but you’d be underestimating the hottest prize in tech, which Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI have been vying to win. Zuckerberg is now coming from behind with a viable shot at getting there first. Having attracted some of AI’s top brains with huge sums and previous pledges to make AI free for all and potentially more impactful, he’s now created momentum among other leading scientists who see his team as having a statistically higher chance of building “super-intelligent” AI systems before anyone else.
In just the last month, Zuckerberg has poached leading OpenAI scientist Lucas Beyer, who co-created the vision transformer; Ruoming Pang, who led Apple Inc.’s efforts at building AI models; and Alexandr Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI who now co-leads Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. In Wang’s case, the cost to Meta was billions. But the result seems to be a halo effect as other big names in the field join, such as investor Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, the CEO of Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence, and the remaining top talent starts to fear missing out on being the first to build super-intelligent AI.
Of course, money is a great motivator, but many of these researchers are already wealthy, and their field is so ideologically charged and so close-knit that they’re motivated by the glory of being published in Nature or having a hand in the biggest new AI model, just as much they are by the prospect of yachts and mansions.
