Zuckerberg Leads AI Recruitment Blitz Armed With $100 Million Packages

The smartest AI researchers and engineers have spent the past few months getting hit up by one of the richest men in the world.

- Meghan Bobrowsky, Berber Jin & Ben Cohen

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's 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.