Meta made some big splashes in the AI talent war, but the tech giant’s AI chief isn’t thrilled by the narrative that his team is a bunch of mercenaries.
“This is one of, I think, the larger, I would say, like narrative violations or maybe like differences between external perception and what the day-to-day inside is like actually,” Wang told tech journalists Ashlee Vance and Kylie Robison during an interview for their “Core Memory” podcast that was posted on Wednesday.
Vance asked Wang about the reputation that Meta’s SuperIntelligence Lab is composed of top AI researchers who were lured away from rival companies, at least in part, thanks to the very generous terms Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team put on the table. Top AI researchers reportedly received $100 million offers.
“I think it’s like an incorrect assumption to think that, like the researchers are just money motivated or anything,” Wang said. “And for most of them actually like, you know, the financial prospects of them staying wherever they were look very good as well, like looked very, very, very strong as well.”
Instead of money, Wang said Meta’s recruits were motivated by other factors, including the prospect of having a large amount of compute at their disposal. Business Insider has previously reported how dedicated compute is a big part of leading tech companies’ recruitment pitch.
“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, because there’s great talent density like people saw that it was like a truly cracked group that was pretty small, and that we were going to give them the resources and freedom to make very bold research bets,” Wang said.
Wang, who cofounded Scale AI, was viewed as one of the top prizes in the AI talent war. Meta spent $14 billion to acquire nearly half of Scale AI and to lure Wang to lead a new AI team. Meta’s other top recruits include former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who helps lead the development of AI products; Ruoming Pang, who was the head of Apple’s foundation model team; and Trapit Bansal, a former top researcher at OpenAI.
Beyond the compensation packages, rival AI and tech executives have poked fun at the lengths Meta went to woo AI researchers. Vance asked Wang about OpenAI’s chief research officer, Mark Chen, who said that Zuckerberg hand-delivered homemade soup to an unnamed OpenAI employee.
“I’ve also delivered soup to people we’ve been recruiting from Meta,” Chen previously told Vance.
Wang said he didn’t think the soup was homemade, but regardless, the moment showed the extent to which Meta was willing to go to show how much they cared.
“Part of the premise of building this lab was also that, like, we had to show everyone that we really, really cared about this technology and we cared about their specific research directions and what they were working on,” he said. “And it was a very individualized recruiting process.”
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