Money, lots of money, and a little personal touch. This is Mark Zuckerberg's strategy to attract the best people to beef up his new AI lab, which is set to work on developing "superintelligence." The CEO of Meta took matters into his own hands by personally hunting for the fifty or so brains who will form the core of this initiative.
Checks galore
Meta has fallen behind in terms of generative AI. The latest Llama 4 models haven't convinced many people, especially since the company had the bad idea of tweaking the benchmarks. Above all, Meta has postponed the launch of the Behemoth model, the most powerful and most anticipated of the lot.
Mark Zuckerberg, who has placed AI at the heart of the company's strategy, has therefore decided to take charge of relaunching the research effort himself, by multiplying meetings with influential researchers and personally supervising strategic recruitments - while the competition, for its part, accelerates without slowing down.
This is the reason why Meta signed a check for $14 billion for a large stake in Scale AI, and placed Alexandr Wang, the startup's boss, at the head of this new initiative.
Zuckerberg has also reportedly offered other specialists crazy sums, up to $100 million (!), to join the ranks of this team. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has reportedly been approached, as has SSI CEO Daniel Gross. Perplexity is also reportedly in Meta's sights (and so is Apple, apparently).
However, not everyone has been seduced by the Meta boss's advances. Some criticize the relative weakness of the Llama models, while others struggle to grasp the company's strategy and its quest for "superintelligence," a vague concept of AI smarter than the human brain.
Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, was amused by the frenzy. He stated that none of the top talent approached by Mark Zuckerberg had decided to join Meta. It must be said that OpenAI responded by offering the profiles hunted by Zuckerberg an additional dollar supplement and additional benefits.
Source: WSJ
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