Big Tech Taps Their Founders As AI Talent Battle Heats Up

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In January, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a video touting the 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units he said the company would have by the end of the year. While the post signaled Meta’s advantage in computing capacity, several current and former employees interpreted it simply as a way to improve Meta’s ability to recruit in the intensely competitive AI world.

Zuckerberg is doing more to recruit artificial intelligence researchers than post on Instagram. He has personally written to researchers at Google DeepMind to woo them, as part of a broader effort by Meta to ramp up hiring in AI, I reported yesterday. And sometimes, that personal touch can make all the difference.

When announcing his move to Meta’s generative AI group earlier this month, former DeepMind researcher Michal Valko gave “massive thanks for a very personal involvement” to Zuckerberg, as well as to some of Meta’s senior AI leaders, including chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and Fundamental AI Research lab head Joelle Pineau. Neither are part of Meta’s generative AI group, which is led by vice president Ahmad Al-Dahle.