Zuckerberg's $100 million AI talent war

What does it take to hire the world's top AI minds?

If you're Mark Zuckerberg – the answer is a secret list, unlimited GPUs, and salary offers up to $100m.

The Meta boss is on the hunt with top researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon in his sights.

These are the people who've helped build some of the world's most powerful AI models and know how to train them faster, deploy them across millions of devices, and make them safer to use.

And Zuckerberg wants to hire them. Personally.

Why? Because Meta is in the middle of an AI arms race, battling rivals like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon for the world's top researchers. Zuckerberg is betting big.

How big? Some compensation packages are reportedly hitting $100m, with many publications claiming that offers over $300m were made in rare cases.

This year, Meta spent $14 billion on a stake in Scale AI – then tapped its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, to co-lead the new Meta Superintelligence Labs, alongside GitHub's former CEO Nat Friedman.

Together, they're tasked with pushing Meta into what Zuckerberg calls the "superintelligence" era – the pursuit of AI systems smarter than humans.

Mega money

Meta's selling point is not just mega salaries. Zuckerberg is also promising recruits unlimited access to compute – a major selling point in a field where cutting-edge chips like GPUs are in short supply. 

But not all the offers are landing.

Several top researchers at OpenAI have turned Meta down – questioning the company's direction, its mission, or whether their work would truly have an impact.

Still, with billions in funding, world-class infrastructure, and Zuckerberg personally combing through research papers to find his next hire, Meta's pitch is only getting harder to ignore.

Could this global talent chase shape who builds the future of artificial intelligence?