Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) AI Chief, Alexandr Wang, has debunked rumors that the company’s SuperIntelligence Lab is staffed with top AI researchers who were poached from rival companies with lucrative pay packages.
On the “Core Memory” podcast with tech journalists Ashlee Vance and Kylie Robison, on Wednesday, Wang addressed the claims that Meta has been aggressively recruiting top AI researchers from competitors, allegedly offering up to $100 million.
He dismissed the idea that these researchers were primarily driven by financial incentives. “I think it’s like an incorrect assumption to think that, like the researchers are just money motivated or anything,” Wang said.
Wang emphasized that the recruits were attracted by other factors, such as the opportunity to have a large amount of computing power at their disposal. “People joined because there was high compute per researcher, so they could make more progress than maybe they would be able to make it wherever they were before,” he explained.
Wang also stressed the importance of showing recruits that Meta genuinely cared about their specific research directions. “And it was a very individualized recruiting process,” he added.
In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI and appointed him to lead its SuperIntelligence Lab.
Meta’s Intense AI Talent Recruitment
The recruitment practices of Meta have been under scrutiny for a while. A month later, Meta reportedly poached top OpenAI researchers, Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung. However, an OpenAI chief research officer, Mark Chen and CEO Sam Altman later claimed that Meta’s attempts at poaching talent were largely unsuccessful.
Chen revealed that the competition for top AI talent has become so fierce that CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally delivered homemade soup to researchers he hoped to recruit from OpenAI. Chen said Meta Platforms spends around $10 billion annually on AI talent and has aggressively targeted OpenAI employees, though several of his direct reports declined Meta's offers.
In October, Meta hired Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati‘s AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. Tulloch reportedly accepted a compensation package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years after Meta failed to acquire the startup and instead targeted several of its employees for recruitment.
Meta has also reportedly pulled top-notch scientists and executives from Anthropic and Alphabet Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google DeepMind to strengthen Meta's AI capabilities.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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