It's known as 'The List'—and it's a secret file of artificial intelligence geniuses

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them—even if it takes pay packages of $100 million

- Ben Cohen, Berber Jin & Meghan Bobrowsky

All over Silicon Valley, the brightest minds in AI are buzzing about "The List," a compilation of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence that Mark Zuckerberg has spent months putting together.

Lucas Beyer works in multimodal vision-language research and describes himself as "a scientist dedicated to the creation of awesomeness." Yu Zhang specializes in automatic speech recognition and barely has an online presence besides his influential papers.

Misha Bilenko is an expert in large-scale machine learning who also enjoys hiking and skiing—or, as he puts it on his website, "applying hill-climbing search and gradient descent algorithms to real-world domains."

The recruits on "The List" typically have Ph.D.s from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They are usually in their 20s and 30s—and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power.

And their previously obscure talents have never been so highly valued.

The chief executives of tech goliaths and heavyweight venture capitalists are cozying up with a few dozen nerdy researchers because their specialized knowledge is the key to cashing in on the artificial-intelligence revolution.

Nobody in this rapidly escalating arms race is chasing the prized recruits quite like Zuckerberg, who has tried to raid Silicon Valley's top research labs, dangling $100 million pay packages to a select few superstars with the hopes of poaching them.

The billionaire CEO of Meta wants them to join his company's new lab focused on superintelligence, or AI that is smarter than humans, after the release of its latest model in April fell flat.