🔫 Mark Zuckerberg’s poaching spree - Snacks \ stacker news ~Stacker

Mark Zuckerberg’s raid of OpenAI

Mark Zuckerberg wants a best-in-class AI development wing at Meta that can outrun all the other contenders in the enormously competitive space.

Bad luck for him that he didn’t actually bother to build that best-in-class AI development wing at Meta when he would have needed to several years ago. Good luck for him, though, that Meta is very, very rich, so now it’s just poaching the best brains from everyone else and seeing what happens.

Meta is offering huge pay packages — some as high as $100 million — to build out its “superintelligence” AI team. Now OpenAI is getting skittish given how thoroughly Zuck’s raided its team.

In an internal memo to employees, Zuckerberg said the new team will be called “Meta Superintelligence Labs,” headed by Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who will be assisted by Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub.

OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen said in a memo on Saturday that the ChatGPT maker is actively talking with workers who’ve received offers from Meta and trying to counter them.

“We’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent,” he wrote.

Zuck’s memo reportedly listed 11 new hires, including top researchers from Google, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

The Takeaway

Reports said the company plans to hire more than 50 people for the team. So far, the biggest target of poaching has been OpenAI, which has shed lots of talent to Menlo Park and accounted for a little more than half of the announced names.

154 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 2 Jul

huge pay packages — some as high as $100 million

Between data center cost (billions and billions of dollars) and these insane hiring cost, I have a hard time understanding how they are going to be profitable.

I guess its all OPM (other peoples money) so maybe he doesn't care.

My personal prediction is this: Just like all other tech, LLM's will eventually be "good enough" and the clamor for ever new models will cease. Further, with new quantization methods (now they are talking about 1-bit quant) its going to be possible to run models locally.

All this will conspire for their to be a race-to-the-bottom in cost, and the days of average react developers paying $200/month will be long-gone (that react dev will just use his "good enough" open source model on his 2028 home PC).

9 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB OP 3 Jul

AI better hope so

59 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 2 Jul

Who's work can really be worth $100 million?