Zuckerberg’s Charm Offensive Nets Meta Three OpenAI Researchers
Zuckerberg and Meta have been on the hunt for the best brains in the AI industry.
The war for top AI talent is heating up. Recently, Meta reported their success in poaching three OpenAI researchers, despite rival Sam Altman’s public mockery of Mark Zuckerberg’s lavish hiring tactics.
The latest conquests in Zuckerberg's widely-reported recruiting blitz are Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai – who established OpenAI’s Zurich office – have joined Meta’s superintelligence team, suggesting Zuckerberg’s methods can deliver.
As OpenAI CEO Altman first revealed in a recent podcast with his brother Jack, Zuckerberg has been dangling $100+ million compensation packages in an effort to lure top talent from OpenAI. Another report claimed that Zuckerberg has been personally WhatsApping hundreds of top AI researchers, coordinating targets through his “Recruiting Party” chat before hosting dinners at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.
Mixed Results
So far, the results vary, with Zuckerberg recently bagging Scale AI’s CEO Alexandr Wang with a $14 billion investment, making the 28-year-old one of tech’s priciest hires ever. On the other hand, bigger game has eluded the Meta CEO, including OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman, both of whom have gone on to co-found newer startups.
In that podcast, Altman said of Zuckerberg’s charm campaign: “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers].”
