Mark Zuckerberg is sparing no expense in his quest to position Meta at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, deploying what industry insiders call an "open-checkbook" approach to recruiting elite AI talent.
In recent weeks, Meta has made a series of high-profile moves that have sent shockwaves through the AI research community. The company invested a staggering $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in data-labeling startup Scale AI, primarily to bring its 28-year-old founder Alexandr Wang aboard to lead Meta's new superintelligence team. This was followed by the recruitment of Daniel Gross, CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, after Zuckerberg's unsuccessful attempt to acquire SSI outright from its founder, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
According to multiple sources, Meta has been offering unprecedented compensation packages, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealing that Meta has attempted to lure OpenAI employees with signing bonuses as high as $100 million and even larger annual compensation. The company has also reportedly taken a stake in NFDG, the venture fund run by Gross and Friedman that has backed prominent AI startups including Perplexity and Character.ai.
This talent acquisition blitz comes as Zuckerberg has grown frustrated with Meta's progress in AI development, particularly with the performance of its Llama language models. The company's self-described "Superintelligence" team aims for fundamental research breakthroughs, but faces internal alignment challenges. Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, a renowned AI pioneer, has expressed skepticism about the large language model path to superintelligence, arguing that LLMs lack true reasoning capabilities and physical world understanding.
The aggressive hiring strategy signals a fundamental shift in how AI research teams are being built, with companies now seeking star researchers who can attract the best talent. As the competition intensifies between Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other tech giants racing toward artificial general intelligence, Zuckerberg's billion-dollar talent raid may accelerate the pace of AI breakthroughs—but also raises questions about whether Meta's approach can overcome the technical limitations LeCun has identified.