Mark Zuckerberg writes to Google AI employees to poach them for Meta: Report

Mark Zuckerberg's eta is reportedly doubling down on AI to revolutionise its platform's video recommendations.

Mark Zuckerberg has personally been writing emails to employees of Google's AI unit DeepMind to recruit them for Meta, The Information reported citing sources who viewed the emails. The move heats up the competition for AI talent in the industry especially with a relatively small pool of capable artificial intelligence (AI) researchers.

According to the report, in his emails, Zuckerberg emphasised the importance of AI to Meta and said he hopes the recipient and the company will work together. Meta is also reportedly offering jobs without formal interviews and negotiating salaries and incentives to attract top talent. The company that had a longstanding practice of not increasing compensation for employees threatening to leave has now even opened up to negotiations, the publication reported.

Meta is reportedly doubling down on AI to revolutionise its platform's video recommendations. Tom Alison, head of Facebook, revealed Meta's plan to consolidate recommendation systems into one powerful AI model, promising more engaging and responsive suggestions. “Instead of just powering Reels, we're working on a project to power our entire video ecosystem with this single model, and then can we add our Feed recommendation product to also be served by this model. If we get this right, not only will the recommendations be kind of more engaging and more relevant, but we think the responsiveness of them can improve as well,” CNBC quoted her as saying.

In another instance of a war for talent among AI researchers, reports suggest that Google co-founder Sergey Brin personally called up an employee when he was about to quit the tech giant and join OpenAI. Brin reportedly offered more money to persuade the employee to continue to work with Google, The Information reported.