Mark Zuckerberg offered enormous financial incentives, up to $1 billion, to recruit AI talent and revive Meta's AI ambitions. More than a dozen people at Thinking Machines Lab received offers and declined. Observers interpret the rejections as evidence that many AI experts distrust Meta, resent Zuckerberg personally, or find the company's culture unattractive. Zuckerberg's public AI pitch, including promises to "automate all valuable work" and "put power in people's hands," drew criticism for vagueness and for potentially concentrating power with platform owners. Critics described the vision as uninspired and unrealistic, and noted that Meta's demanding workplace could deter recruits.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been stealing headlines by offering AI talent mind-boggling financial offers, reportedly reaching $1 billion, to keep his social media company's floundering ambitions of winning the AI race alive. As Wired reported last month, Meta approached more than a dozen people at Thinking Machines Lab, an AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati - none of whom took the offer.
That failure illustrates the grim truth at the heart of the outsize financial overtures, as New York Magazine's John Herrman points out: though Zuckerberg would like the world to see his poaching efforts as a sign of his belief in the power of AI, the reality feels more like a situation in which he's so widely loathed in the tech industry that he needs to bribe AI luminaries with heart-stopping paydays just to put up with him.
While we can only speculate as to why AI talent is turning down hundreds of millions of dollars, Zuckerberg was broadly criticized over his vision for Meta's AI team last month, vaguely claiming that "automating all valuable work" will somehow put "power in people's hands to direct it towards what they value in their own lives" - instead of concentrating power for those who control the AI.
"I think the most interesting thing about Zuck's vision here is how... boring it is," Transformer journalist Shakeel Hashim tweeted at the time. "Just entirely devoid of ambition and imagination." Potential hires might also be put off by Zuckerberg's unrealistic goals of creating a utopian society that can conveniently only be observed through a pair of smart glasses that he'll sell you.
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