Good morning,
Mark Zuckerberg will not be counted out of the AI race. While the latest of Meta’s (No. 22) home-grown Llama large language models missed benchmarks and disappointed many users, there are very few problems billions of dollars can’t solve.
Zuckerberg is personally putting staggering pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars in front of a relatively tiny pool of top AI researchers.
We have written about the AI researcher talent wars previously at Fortune. This week, AI reporter Sharon Goldman dug into Zuckerberg’s determined plan to be the builder of artificial “superintelligence,” which he says will usher in a “new era for humanity.”
Meta investors are loving Zuckerberg’s take-no-prisoners approach to the AI race, with the stock up more than 20% this year. The company’s latest bombshell news: a memo announcing the addition of 11 AI researchers to Meta, most of them poached from rival OpenAI, the architect of ChatGPT.
Zuckerberg is striking at a particularly tough time for OpenAI, which is bickering with its biggest backer, Microsoft, while also trying to become a for-profit company—and meeting opposition from its cofounder turned foe, Elon Musk.
Meanwhile, others left behind at the companies Zuckerberg is raiding are reeling.
“OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen described the situation as feeling like someone ‘breaking into our home,’ calling the talent loss ‘theft,’” Goldman writes.
Check out her story on Meta’s bold multibillion-dollar shopping spree to assemble a star-studded superintelligence team—and why the brash move could prove to be risky.
