It’s been said that the way to one’s heart is through their stomach. It sounds like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted to see if the AI talent war, or at least one skirmish, could be won the same way.
Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, recently said that Zuckerberg personally delivered homemade soup to an OpenAI employee as part of a campaign to recruit the unnamed worker to Meta.
“It’s been kind of interesting and fun to see it escalate over time. You know, some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us,” Chen told Ashlee Vance on the author’s “Core Memory” podcast.
Chen said Zuckerberg’s move was “shocking to me at the time” but since then, he said he’s returned the favor.
“I’ve also delivered soup to people we’ve been recruiting from Meta,” Chen said, laughing.
The poaching efforts focused on OpenAI’s researchers and engineers underscores the company’s position in the AI race, Chen said.
“We’re always under attack,” Chen told Vance. “This is how I know we’re in the lead, right? Any company starts, where do they try to recruit from? It’s OpenAI. They want the expertise, they want our vision, our philosophy of the world. And we’ve made so many star researchers, right? I think OpenAI, more than anywhere else, has been a place that makes names in AI today.”
Arguably, no other rival tech company has been as aggressive in the so-called AI talent wars against OpenAI as Zuckerberg’s Meta.
In June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta tried to lure some of his engineers with $100 million signing bonuses. The CEO said at the time that none of his top talent was poached, but ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao later joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.
Chen said that Meta tried to recruit “half” of Chen’s direct reports unsuccessfully, but that OpenAI has been “fairly good” at retaining top talent. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment.
Top AI researchers have become a hot commodity in the AI race, as it’s generally believed that there is a relatively small number of researchers and engineers capable of achieving breakthroughs or building new LLMs from the ground up.
“It’s like looking for LeBron James,” Databricks’ vice president of AI, Naveen Rao, told The Verge’s Command Line newsletter last year. “There are just not very many humans who are capable of that.”
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