Tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin are personally recruiting AI talent as the competition for top-tier researchers heats up. Zuckerberg has reached out to AI researchers at DeepMind, while Brin personally called an employee about to leave for OpenAI and offered them incentives to stay. Meta is extending job offers without interviews and relaxing salary policies to retain talent. Zuckerberg’s personal outreach has already attracted a senior engineer from DeepMind to join Meta. However, Meta’s salary packages for AI researchers are reportedly lower than those offered by competitors like OpenAI. Despite layoffs in non-AI divisions, tech companies are aggressively pursuing AI engineers, even offering seven-figure annual pay packages to entire engineering teams. For instance, a chip-recruiting company president convinced an AI engineering manager to leave Microsoft for a startup with a lower base salary but promising stock options potentially worth $40 million. This intense talent war reflects the high demand for AI expertise in developing chat bots and language models.
