Mark Zuckerberg's strange actions

Mark Zuckerberg personally searches for talent for Meta. Photo: WSJ .

In an effort to bring Meta up to speed with the AI race, Mark Zuckerberg has personally spearheaded a tech talent recruitment campaign. Not only sending direct messages via email or WhatsApp, Meta CEO is also willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to invite the world's top minds to work for him.

According to WSJ , the tech billionaire has approached hundreds of researchers, engineers, scientists , infrastructure experts and even entrepreneurs in the field of AI. The main purpose is to build a new “super intelligence” team at Meta. In some cases, Mark Zuckerberg has offered salary packages of up to $ 100 million , along with invitations to dinner at his private home in Palo Alto or Lake Tahoe.

Some people who received Mark Zuckerberg's initial message thought it was a joke. However, when they confirmed that the contact was indeed the CEO of Meta, they were convinced by the intensity and unprecedented level of investment from the company's founder himself.

Unexpected action

Zuckerberg didn’t stop at sending out invitations. He negotiated acquisitions of startups, invested billions of dollars, and offered to buy shares in venture capital funds to bring key people to Meta. Among them, the $14 billion deal with Scale AI, the company founded by Alexandr Wang, has made a big splash recently.

The 28-year-old CEO is expected to lead Meta’s new AI team and become one of the highest-paid people in the tech industry. In addition to Wang, Meta has also tapped industry heavyweights like John Schulman (a co-founder of OpenAI), Bill Peebles (the man behind the video- generating project Sora) and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former head of engineering.

Mark Zuckerberg surprised everyone by sending an email to the candidate himself. Photo: Bloomberg .

Meta has now invested in a new AI company co-founded by Sutskever and is in talks with Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, two influential names in the AI community, to buy back part of the investment fund they run.

In addition, Zuckerberg also proactively contacted Perplexity, an AI startup, and made an acquisition offer. However, there is no official information about the results of the above deals.

“An email from him carries more weight than all the recruiting professionals,” said one source.

Zuckerberg’s strategy has caught the tech world’s attention, not just for the money involved, but also for its direct and detailed approach. The Meta CEO even proactively planned desk locations for potential candidates, while also pledging maximum support in terms of computing resources and finance, something that not many tech companies can afford.

Ambitious with the new team

Mark Zuckerberg has created a dedicated recruiting team called the “Recruiting Party” to constantly monitor progress, working closely with HR director Janelle Gale and head of recruiting Ruta Singh. The Meta CEO is given access to AI research papers, deep dives into the technology, and a personal network of leading scientists to scale up his recruiting efforts.

Meta CEO wants to create a new team of experts to build super AI. Photo: Bloomberg .

Despite the apparent effort, Meta’s “AI supergroup” has been met with skepticism. Some candidates say Zuckerberg’s goal of “achieving superintelligence” is vague, lacking a specific roadmap beyond massive recruitment. The social media giant’s lack of organizational stability and constant restructuring has also made many experts wary.

Within the company, differences in development perspectives have also emerged. Yann LeCun, an AI scientist at Meta who was hired by Zuckerberg in 2013, does not believe that large language models (LLMs) can lead humanity to superintelligence. This view is contrary to the current trend that Meta is pursuing.

Now, Facebook’s parent company is trying to regain ground in a game it once led. As the industry races to “weaponize AI,” Zuckerberg believes that finding talent in-house is the quickest and most effective way to turn things around.

Source: https://znews.vn/hanh-dong-ky-la-cua-mark-zuckerberg-post1563107.html