TechCapsules

AI-summarised brief · reviewed before publication

The company is shelling out billions of dollars to lure top talent from competitors, sparking doubts about the wisdom of this recruitment spree. According to OpenAI boss Sam Altman, Meta has offered engineers US$100 million bonuses to jump ship and join Mark Zuckerberg's team, where they can expect hefty salaries. A few OpenAI employees have reportedly taken Meta up on the offer, joining Scale AI founder and former chief executive Alexandr Wang at the Menlo Park-based tech titan. In mid-June, Meta paid more than US$14 billion for a 49 per cent stake in Scale AI, bringing Wang on board as part of the deal. Scale AI labels data to better train AI models for businesses, governments, and labs. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the partnership, saying, "Meta has finalized our strategic partnership and investment in Scale AI. As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models, and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts." US media outlets have reported that Meta's recruitment effort has also targeted OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, Google rival Perplexity AI, and hot AI video startup Runway. The reason behind this push is reportedly Mark Zuckerberg's worries that Meta is lagging behind its rivals in the generative AI race. To put these concerns into perspective, Meta's latest AI model, Llama, finished behind its heavyweight rivals in code writing rankings at an LM Arena platform that lets users evaluate the technology. To catch up, Meta is integrating its recruits into a new team dedicated to developing "superintelligence," or AI that outperforms people when it comes to thinking and understanding. Tech blogger Zvi Moshowitz believes that Meta had to take drastic measures to get back in the game, but questions whether this spending spree will ultimately pay off.