Meta is offering $100 million signing bonuses and up to $300 million over four years to recruit top AI researchers. About 20 of roughly 50 targeted scientists have already joined. The speakers argue Meta values their ability to predict breakthroughs, not stolen secrets from competitors like OpenAI.
Zuck is throwing the bag at every researcher. $100 million signing bonuses, and he's poaching basically his own dream team. They started making these like giant offers to people on our team. $100 million signing bonuses.
$100 million signing bonus and $300 million over 4 years, I think is what I saw.
If I had to use one word, I would say diabolical. Not stupid, not silly, but diabolical. I think he's got a hit list of 50 targets.
19 or 20 of them have come on board already. How good could $100 million or $300 million a year engineer be? Part of the value is, yes, they're super smart, but that doesn't doesn't explain away the value, right?
That's not that. It's not that they've seen the inside of OpenAI and they have some trade secrets in their head that they can then kind of carry over. It's like, I think the larger thing, I think kind of vector of value is they sort of have demonstrated the ability to kind of see around corners and see into the future, right? They believed in this thing that almost no one believed in at the time. And that's much rarer than you would think. They sort of know what's possible and they almost think of what many of us would consider impossible as actually being inevitable.
