On Tuesday, OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, says the competition for elite AI researchers has become so intense that Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally delivered homemade soup to candidates he hoped to lure away.
OpenAI Says Meta's Recruiting Blitz Has Fallen Short
Speaking on the Core Memory podcast, Chen offered a rare inside look at the escalating "recruitment wars" between top AI labs.
While media reports have highlighted Meta's aggressive hiring push, Chen said the ChatGPT-maker also hasn't been sitting "idly."
"I think that a lot has been made in the media of ‘oh, there’s this unidirectional flow of talent over to Meta,' but the way that I’ve seen it is [that] Meta they’ve gone after a lot of people quite unsuccessfully," he said.
Chen said that Meta targeted many of his own direct reports, but they declined. "Before they hired anyone from OpenAI think they went after half of my direct reports and they all declined."
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Inside Big Tech's Bizarre Battle For AI Talent
Chen also said that Meta has a huge budget — around $10 billion per year for AI talent. So it's inevitable that they will land some hires, but he feels OpenAI has done pretty well at retaining its top people.
Then Chen shared one of the most surprising moments of the hiring battle: a personal recruitment attempt by Zuckerberg himself.
"Zuck actually went and hand-delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us," Chen said, noting that the Meta CEO even cooked it himself. "It was shocking to me at the time, but over time I've updated toward these things can be effective in their own way."
The gesture didn't end there. Chen later that he later adopted the tactic too. "I’ve also delivered soup to people that we’ve been recruiting from Meta," he said, laughing.
Mark Zuckerberg's Billion-Dollar Recruitment Efforts
In August, reports surfaced that Meta had put a halt to hiring in its AI division after months of aggressive recruiting efforts that included compensation offers reaching into the nine figures.
Meta brought on more than 50 researchers and engineers from rival companies — including OpenAI, Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) — by extending compensation packages reportedly as high as $100 million.
CEO Zuckerberg also took a hands-on approach, personally reaching out to candidates and even offering $1.5 billion to Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Andrew Tulloch, who ultimately turned it down.
Meta did, however, manage to bring on Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as its chief AI officer through a $14 billion equity deal.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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