Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is going all-in on his mission to build a superintelligence lab, and he’s doing it by personally targeting the industry’s top talent.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta is using a closely guarded document, known as “The List”, to identify potential recruits.
As per the report, recruits on ‘The List’, usually between the ages of 20 and 30, typically have PhDs from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon. They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco, and Google DeepMind in London. Zuckerberg’s personal involvementFar from delegating the process, Zuckerberg has been directly involved, from reading technical papers, reviewing hundreds of candidates, to brainstorming strategies in a private group chat with two Meta executives called “Recruiting Party.” The outreach is done through email, text, or even WhatsApp.
The candidates Meta targets tend to have:
PhDs in AI-related fields
Experience at leading AI research labs
Notable contributions to AI breakthroughs
The AI research world is small and interconnected. Researchers often collaborate in private Slack and Discord groups, and even swap job offers to negotiate better deals. Two sources familiar with these groups confirmed this practice, as per WSJ.
Meta has reportedly approached dozens of researchers at OpenAI, intensifying Silicon Valley’s AI talent war.
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has also claimed, “Mark Zuckerberg has offered engineers in my company multi-million-dollar packages, but not even a single employee has so far accepted the offer.”