Qualifications that techies Mark Zuckerberg has hired personally at $100 million-plus pay packages have: Degree in …
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is aggressively recruiting top AI talent for his new superintelligence lab, using a curated document known as “The List” to target the industry’s brightest minds. According to the Wall Street Journal, “The recruits on ‘The List’ typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. As a report in WSJ said, “The recruits on “The List” typically have Ph.D.s from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They are usually in their 20s and 30s—and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power.”Zuckerberg has personally spearheaded the recruitment, diving into technical papers and strategizing with two Meta executives in a group chat dubbed “Recruiting Party” to discuss hundreds of candidates and outreach methods, such as email, text, or WhatsApp. The List prioritizes candidates with PhDs in AI-related fields, experience at leading labs, and significant contributions to AI breakthroughs. Meta’s recent hire, an algorithm design enthusiast, exemplifies the profile. The people who get notes from Zuckerberg reportedly have a few things in common: They need to know calculus, linear algebra and probability theory, like one of Meta’s recent hires, who says he’s fascinated by algorithm design. The AI community is tight-knit, with researchers forming Slack and Discord groups to share and discuss job offers, often leveraging competing offers to boost their value. Two sources familiar with these groups confirmed this practice. Meta has targeted dozens of OpenAI researchers, intensifying the Silicon Valley talent race.Leading Zuckerberg’s superintelligence team is 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, a New Mexico native and son of Chinese immigrant physicists. Meta recently invested $14 billion in Wang’s company, Scale AI, making him one of the most expensive hires in history. Meta has also reportedly made offers to dozens of researchers at OpenAI. This is said to have forced OPenAI to change its compensation structure. Not just this, the company’s CTO also sent an open letter to employees asking them not to fall for Zuckerberg’s offer. The company also shut down for almost a week. OpenAI’s ex-CTO Mira Murati too has said that Mark Zuckerberg has also offered engineers in her company multi-million-dollar packages, but not even a single employee has so far accepted the offer.
