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Mark Zuckerberg has called reports on Meta’s million dollar pay packages to poach artificial intelligence staff from competitors “inaccurate”, but did not elaborate on the actual numbers in an interview with The Information.
Speaking to the publication on reports of “$100-200 million” pay packages for Meta’s “Superintelligence” AI team, Mark Zuckerkberg called it a “hot market” adding that it makes “sense” to spend big on gaining the right talent.
Price for AI talent ‘competitive’, says Mark Zuckerberg
“A lot of the specifics that have been reported aren’t accurate by themselves. But it is a very hot market,” the 41-year-old CEO of Meta acknowleged, adding, “There’s a small number of researchers, which are the best, who are in demand by all of the different labs. So I think that it certainly is quite competitive.”
He further noted that in the big scheme of AI expenses, wherein the industry is pushing “hundreds of billions of dollars on compute and building out multiple gigawatt of clusters.. it really does make sense to compete super hard” to get the top 50-70 researchers to build your team.
Mark Zuckerberg explains Meta’s lucrative AI pay packages
Explaining the decision to offer lucrative pay packages to AI recuits, the tech billionaire also noted that AI does not need a “massive team”, stating, “You actually kind of want the smallest group of people who can fit the whole thing in their head. So there’s just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.”
“So it kind of makes sense when you kind of think about it that, from that perspective, the amount that is being spent to recruit the people is actually still quite small compared to the overall investment and all when you talk about super intelligence,” he added.
On poaching allegations, and ‘discomfort’ in interactions with Sam Altman
When asked about any discomfort in interactions with Sam Altman after the poaching allegations, Mark Zuckerberg was flippant. “I mean, what would I say? We’re building up this new team from scratch, and there’s like, five or six places in the world that have a lot of great researchers. You know, Meta, of course, is one of them. And part of what we’re doing is pulling over a lot of the key folks into the new efforts as well,” he explained.
“But we’re also doing a big recruiting push, so we’re not trying to target anyone individually. I want to make sure that I personally get to know all of the top researchers in the industry. So that way, whether it’s now or in the future, if there’s a good opportunity to work together, then we can, we can make that happen,” he added.
Meta building gigawatt-size data centers: What is Prometheus?
In a post on Threads, Zuckerberg also announced that Meta is building several massive data centers to power its AI ambitions, with the first one — called Prometheus, based in Ohio — expected to come online next year.
“We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well,” he added, hinting that all their data centres would be named after Greek titans of myth. Zuckerberg described the data centers as multigigawatt “clusters”. The biggest such facility is being built in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which the Facebook co-founder has touted as being “nearly the size of Manhattan”.
This comes after Meta in April said it could spend as much as $72 billion on capex, with focus on AI and the data centers used to train and run the models.
Till July 15, Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs team includes researchers poached from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and other top AI companies. Big names such as Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer; former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Apple Inc.’s Ruoming Pang, are all on board for reported exorbitant pay packages, according to a Bloomberg report.
In his post, Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta is going to invest “hundreds of billions of dollars” into data center capacity to build superintelligence. “We have the capital from our business to do this,” he wrote.
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