Mark Zuckerberg wants to hire AI experts
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, has been personally contacting talent at Google’s DeepMind, sending personal emails to attract them to Meta’s AI projects.
This highlights the increasing competition for AI talent, with Meta using different strategies to attract top researchers.
Sources familiar with the matter, speaking to The Information, revealed that Zuckerberg’s emails emphasize AI’s importance to Meta and aim to persuade DeepMind employees to join Meta. The sources, who requested anonymity, disclosed that at least one person has been recruited through these personalized letters.
Meta has adopted several proactive recruitment approaches in the AI sector. They’re skipping standard interviews, instead offering positions directly to standout candidates.
Additionally, Meta has enhanced pay packages for employees considering roles at competing AI firms, aiming to keep them on board.
The high demand for AI talent has led companies such as Meta to take drastic steps. With a limited talent pool, tech giants are aggressively recruiting, as shown in a recent Fortune report on the competitive atmosphere at major machine learning conferences.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, shared his challenges in recruiting a senior researcher from Meta, underscoring the fierce competition for AI expertise.
Srinivas highlighted on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast that acquiring substantial resources, like NVIDIA’s coveted H100 GPUs, is crucial in the competitive AI landscape.
To strengthen its AI efforts, Meta is heavily investing in NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs, aiming to acquire more than 340,000 units. This substantial investment demonstrates Meta’s dedication to enhancing AI capabilities across its platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
As Meta vies with competitors like Microsoft and its partner OpenAI, the company is investing heavily in AI talent and resources, indicating a strong push for leadership in the AI field.
Meta’s chief AI scientist on AI’s future
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, recently made headlines with his views on AGI, responding to Elon Musk’s tweet suggesting AI would soon surpass human intelligence.
LeCun, considered a godfather of AI, disagreed with Musk, arguing that if AI were truly advancing so rapidly, we would already have AI systems capable of learning complex tasks, like driving, in just 20 hours, similar to a 17-year-old’s learning curve.
LeCun’s comments underscore his scepticism towards the rapid development of super intelligent AI, a stance he has previously expressed in opposition to Musk’s concerns about AI’s potential threat to humanity.
