Zuckerberg personally takes action! Meta initiates a fierce battle for AI talent

Against the backdrop of advancing AI technology, the competition for AI talent is particularly fierce, and the ability to attract and retain AI professionals is seen as one of the key factors for success among current tech giants.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that Meta is competing with multiple companies for talent, including OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Musk's xAI, and French startup Mistral, among other competitors.

In the talent war, Meta has deployed "three major tactics," such as increasing salaries, streamlining the recruitment process, and having the CEO directly involved in recruitment, demonstrating a high level of trust and importance placed on talent. However, its salaries are not as competitive as those of rivals like OpenAI and Google, with a gap of up to $8 million per year, leading to a significant loss of talent.

Meta's "Three Major Tactics" for Talent Acquisition

In this intense battle, Meta has adopted a series of non-traditional strategies, such as increasing salaries, streamlining the recruitment process, and CEO directly participating in recruitment, to attract AI researchers.

1) Extending job offers without interviews. Typically, job seekers go through a series of interviews before receiving a job offer. However, Meta chooses to skip this step and directly extend job offers to candidates, indicating a high level of trust in their abilities and a willingness to hire them immediately without thorough scrutiny.

2) Willing to offer salary increases to employees threatening to leave. Meta had been reluctant to offer salary increases to employees threatening to leave, fearing it might trigger others to follow suit. However, facing intensified competition in the AI field, Meta seems to have relaxed this policy and sometimes agrees to salary increases to retain employees considering leaving.

3) Mark Zuckerberg personally writing letters to DeepMind researchers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally reached out to researchers at DeepMind, Google's deep learning research organization, inviting them to join Meta. In the letters, Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of AI to Meta's future and expressed his desire for researchers to collaborate with the company. This direct intervention demonstrates the company's high regard for top AI talent.

Severe Talent Drain at Meta

However, the salaries offered by Meta are not as generous in many cases compared to its competitors like DeepMind and OpenAI, which could lead to talent drain.

Previously, some researchers responsible for developing Meta's large language models have left the company and joined industry competitors such as DeepMind, OpenAI, and French startup Mistral.

According to reports, former employees revealed that top AI researchers at Meta have annual total salaries ranging from $1 million to $2 million, a salary level corresponding to researchers with high status in the industry. Moreover, for AI researchers who joined Meta early on and progressed within the company, achieving a salary exceeding $1 million is relatively challengingIn contrast, after completing a round of stock sales, OpenAI mostly offers annual salaries in the form of stocks ranging from $5 million to $10 million. DeepMind also provides millions of dollars worth of stocks with a "lock-up period" for some researchers.

This salary gap may lead to talent loss. It is reported that at Meta, at least 17 researchers have left the company in the past year, including in two key large-scale language model (LLM) projects - Llama 2 and the original Llama. Among the 68 authors of Llama 2, 10 are no longer working at Meta, and at least 7 of the 14 authors of the paper on the original Llama model published in February 2023 have also left.

The next generation Llama model under development, Llama 3, has also experienced the departure of key members, including Louis Martin in charge of security and Kevin Stone leading reinforcement learning.

To address this challenge, Meta is actively recruiting new talents to fill vacancies and enhance its strength in the AI field. Currently, the company has about 1,500 open positions, with approximately 10% related to AI, covering areas such as AI research, AI infrastructure, and generative AI.

According to a current employee, the generative AI department at Meta responsible for developing Llama 3 and other AI products is seeking to recruit around 100 new members, bringing the total to about 600 people (including the existing 500), with the team reporting to Vice President Ahmad Al-Dahle