Zuckerberg’s $100 Million AI Job Offers Are Paying Off
Meta’s CEO is creating momentum among top scientists who want to be first to build ‘superintelligent’ AI.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms, is luring top AI talent with a combination of cash and compute.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
Nothing says talent war like a $100 million job offer. Mark Zuckerberg has been on a hiring blitz for AI’s most revered scientists, sending them cold emails and offering them roles in his new Superintelligence Labs division whose goal is nothing less than to build artificial-intelligence software that’s smarter than humans.
You might wonder why the Meta Platforms Inc. chief executive officer, whose company already prints money from clever ad targeting and recommendation software, needs to build god-like AI, but you’d be underestimating the hottest prize in tech, which Alphabet Inc.’s Google and OpenAI have been vying to win. Zuckerberg is now coming from behind with a viable shot at getting there first. Having attracted some of AI’s top brains with huge sums and previous pledges to make AI free for all and potentially more impactful, he’s now created momentum among other leading scientists who see his team as having a statistically higher chance of building “super-intelligent” AI systems before anyone else.