Zuckerberg Offered AI Specialist Over $1 Billion, But Was Refused

As The Wall Street Journal has found out , Zuckerberg is on a real hunt for the best minds in the field of AI, not stopping at astronomical sums. At the beginning of the year, Zuckerberg tried to acquire Ilya Sutskever's startup Safe Superintelligence Inc., but the deal fell through.

Later, Zuckerberg approached Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, for advice on improving his company’s AI efforts. Chen noted that the company was investing 100 times more in computing power than in personnel, and advised him to be more proactive in recruiting talent. Zuckerberg immediately offered him a contract worth hundreds of millions or even a billion dollars, but Chen declined.

Despite this rejection, Zuckerberg continued his hunt for the best minds in AI. He compiled a list of top specialists and began poaching them, regardless of the cost. For example, to attract Alexander Wang, his company acquired Scale AI for $14 billion. He also managed to poach Daniel Gross from Safe Superintelligence.

To date, more than 40 leading experts from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and other companies have already joined Zuckerberg's team. Some were offered contracts worth $300 million over four years, with an immediate payment of $100 million. The decision-making period was limited to 72 hours, so that previous employers would not have time to outbid them.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the situation a "battle between missionaries and mercenaries," expressing confidence in the former's victory. Mark Chen supported him, comparing the competitor's actions to theft and promising to strengthen employee retention measures. In response, Zuckerberg said that his company would provide specialists with unprecedented computing power - by the end of the year, their GPU fleet will reach 1.3 million chips.