Mark Zuckerberg has been making a list — and keeping his cheque book open. Simply titled The List to those in the know, it’s a dream sheet of AI talent the Meta CEO and founder wants to lure to his Superintelligence Labs.
The second richest man in the world is sparing no expense when it comes to his new hiring spree. That they’re often already employed by his major rivals doesn’t seem to matter, either.
Ruoming Pang was running the AI models team at Apple until he defected to Meta — for a pay package more than $200 million. Apple did not attempt to counter the offer, Bloomberg reported. Unsurprising, given Apple CEO Tim Cook took home a mere $74.6m in 2024.
Such inflated sums are usually only seen at major banks or for football players. Which is why some Silicon Valley wonks have dubbed it “AI draft season” after the NFL. Most shockingly, it could well be that Pang’s signing bonus alone is a whopping $100m. How do we know? Because Open AI founder Sam Altman went on his brother’s podcast and spilled the tea about it.
“They started making these giant offers to a lot of people on our team, like $100m signing bonuses,” Altman said on Uncapped, although he added that “none of our best people have decided to take them up on that”. A subtle dig, perhaps, at the 10 or more Open AI staffers that have reportedly gone over to Meta for the money.
Three Open AI defectors include Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai, a trio of Google DeepMind alumni who were charged with setting up the Zurich office for Altman’s company. And Open AI has been taking the poaching situation personally. After four more employees all jumped ship to Meta, chief research officer Mark Chen posted an emotional message to Open AI’s staff.
“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Chen wrote, according to the message seen by Wired. He promised OpenAI would be “recalibrating comp” to ward off the lure of bigger pay cheques, while exhorting employees to focus on the company’s mission of creating artificial general intelligence . “Skirmishes with Meta are the side quest,” Chen wrote.
.jpeg)
For Zuckerberg, however, this is very much the main storyline. Multiple outlets have reported that the Meta leader has group chats with other employees where they discuss recruiting tactics and is personally reaching out to people he wants to hire.
Zuck’s biggest investment by far, however, has been in 28-year-old Alexandr Wang. Meta invested $14 billion for a stake in Wang’s start-up, Scale AI, and made him the leader of the Superintelligence team.
This isn’t simply a case of a billionaire tech founder throwing his financial weight around. Zuckerberg has been on a war footing since DeepSeek shocked the tech world in January. The Chinese start-up’s R1 model wildly outperformed Meta’s model, Llama, at a fraction of the cost to develop.
Llama 4 launched in April, but it still isn’t measuring up to DeepSeek. So Meta is doubling down, and the human employees are the cheapest part of its plans. This week, Zuckerberg announced he would invest hundreds of billions of dollars building gigawatt-sized AI data centres. The offer of this kind of processing power may clinch the deal for other AI experts, unswayed by pay cheques but looking to work on their niche research.
While the talent war rages on and the select few will be earning more money than they could spend in a lifetime, most will be hoping not to be replaced by AI — or at least not until the hype bubble bursts.
