Zuckerberg Emailing Google Employees, Asking Them to Work for Facebook Instead

AI talent is a highly coveted commodity.

Marked Man

The hunt for talent in the AI world is getting so competitive that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly started writing personal emails to employees at Google's DeepMind, imploring them to come and work on Facebook's AI projects instead.

Two people told The Information about the personally penned letters from Zuckerberg, with at least one of them admitting to being headhunted. The news outlet kept the two sources anonymous.

In the emails, Zuckerberg stressed the importance of AI to his company in a bid to attract them to Meta.

Other extraordinary measures that Meta has taken to recruit AI researchers include waiving interviews and directly offering job offers to promising candidates — as well as jacking up pay to Meta employees who want to jump ship to another AI outfit, according to The Information's reporting. In other words, the funding floodgates are wide open for the AI hype train.

Seller's Market

It's certainly not everyday that one of the wealthiest people in the world would stoop to doing the job of a tech recruiter. But Zuckerberg isn't alone.

Hiring for smart and talented AI researchers is going overdrive because the talent pool is limited. Fortune had reported in December that one of the biggest machine learning conferences was basically a tech recruiting free-for-all.

Summing up the churn was a podcast interview with AI company Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

"I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? 'Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'" Srinivas said during an episode of the podcast "Invest Like the Best," as spotted by Entrepreneur and referring to Nvidia's red-hot chips that are currently powering the AI world.

Zuckerberg is pouring endless buckets of cash into his AI division in a bid to race against Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, which so far have maintained an early lead.

Meta is aiming to accumulate more than 340,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, all to drive AI into its popular apps: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, whether we want them or not.

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