Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly took a highly personal and aggressive approach to recruiting top artificial intelligence (AI) talent, offering individual packages worth up to $100 million (approximately Rs 860 crore) as part of his plan to build a "superintelligence" team within the company, the Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the report, Zuckerberg personally contacted hundreds of scientists, researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs in recent months in a bid to attract them to Meta's newly established Superintelligence lab. This level of personal involvement has included direct messages, private meetings, and extended conversations—surprising many recipients who initially doubted whether the outreach was genuinely from the Meta CEO.
Those offers, which placed prospective recruits among the most expensive hires in tech industry history, were part of a broader multi-billion-dollar strategy to regain Meta’s footing in the increasingly competitive AI landscape.
The report noted that Zuckerberg’s compensation packages to select candidates reached as high as $100 million. In one of the boldest moves so far, he invested $14 billion in AI startup Scale AI, securing a stake in the company and onboarding its 28-year-old CEO Alexandr Wang. Wang has since been tapped to lead Zuckerberg’s newly minted AI team, marking one of the most significant and high-profile hires in the sector to date.
In addition to Wang, Zuckerberg also approached other prominent AI figures. Among them was Aravind Srinivas, co-founder of Perplexity—an AI-powered search startup. The Meta CEO reportedly expressed interest in acquiring the company outright. He also attempted to court employees from rival OpenAI, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
However, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, claimed that none of his key personnel had accepted Zuckerberg’s offers. According to the Wall Street Journal, some of those who turned down the proposal cited the lack of clarity around Zuckerberg’s concept of “superintelligence” and Meta’s execution plan for it.
The outreach was not limited to high-level discussions. Zuckerberg was said to have remained deeply involved in the recruitment process, often meeting potential hires at his private residences in Palo Alto or Lake Tahoe, and personally overseeing where they would sit once they joined the team.
His unusually direct engagement has startled some prospective hires. In several instances, recipients of the emails reportedly dismissed them as hoaxes, doubting that Zuckerberg himself would initiate contact without intermediaries.
Those who were convinced, however, were often hosted by Zuckerberg and remained in touch throughout their onboarding process. His belief, as per the report, is that the AI division is the most important area where he can make a lasting impact at Meta.
Zuckerberg’s moves come as global tech giants intensify the race to dominate AI, particularly in the realms of generative models, LLMs (large language models), and autonomous agents.
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