Researchers On Meta’s “List” Command Immense Paydays

Silicon Valley is abuzz about a list of the world’s best minds working on AI, compiled by Meta, as the tech giant pours massive amounts of money into luring them to its new superintelligence team.

The Big Picture: The list of people who are actually able to work on and advance cutting-edge AI models is quite small (about a few dozen), especially considering that, just a handful of years ago, academic research was the endgame for that type of education. But now that AI has become fully commercialized, tech giants see these technically brilliant minds as the talent that could bring untold riches.

Behind the Hires: If you’re on Meta’s list, expect there to be a lot of digits on your next salary offer… with some pay packages even reaching $100 million.

• The talent on the list is, by and large, engineers and researchers in their 20s and 30s who hold PhDs from places like Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. They’re experts in calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory.
• They’ve put in time at other AI giants like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic and are responsible for countless published research papers that other AI engineers cite.
• Also, most of the talent on the list are familiar with one another, having attended the same school or lived together in the Bay Area, which allows them to compare notes about job offers. Some are so close that they’re negotiating employment as a group.

The Future: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been personally reaching out to people on the company’s internal list, inviting them to weekends at his compound in Tahoe to win them over. The new hires will work under new Meta Chief AI Officer, Alexandr Wang, who joined the company after Meta acquired his company, ScaleAI, for $14 billion.

Not to be outdone, the heads of all the other major AI companies are scheduling face time with the desired AI talent, offering massive pay bumps to keep them from defecting to Meta.

Prediction: For many AI researchers and engineers, the company that provides them with the most autonomy and computing power may get the upper hand, so expect Meta to announce a flurry of AI infrastructure investments as a means to pull ahead of the competition.