Meta Platforms Inc. META CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly making a personal effort to recruit top AI talent from Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL GOOG Google subsidiary DeepMind, offering positions without interviews and higher salaries.
What Happened: Zuckerberg has been reaching out to AI researchers at DeepMind with personal emails, reported The Information, citing sources who have seen the emails.
The Meta CEO has also been offering jobs without interviews and relaxing the company’s policy on higher salaries for employees with competing job offers.
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These aggressive recruitment tactics are part of Zuckerberg’s broader strategy to position Meta as a leading player in the AI industry.
In an interview in January, Zuckerberg revealed Meta’s plans to acquire over 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.
Meta has also been advocating for an open-source approach to AI development, releasing the mostly open-source AI model Llama 2 in July.
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This also comes at a time when Apple Inc. is considering teaming up with either Google or Microsoft Corp.-backed OpenAI to offer generative AI features on iPhones.
Why It Matters: Zuckerberg’s aggressive recruitment drive comes on the heels of Meta’s ambitious AI initiatives.
In January, Zuckerberg outlined Meta’s plans to advance its AI research and development, emphasizing the integration of AI efforts to support the company’s long-term goals, including building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, open-sourcing it responsibly, and making it universally accessible and useful.
Meanwhile, Google has been facing AI-related challenges. A former Google engineer warned more than five years ago that the threat from AI was “near inevitable.”
Google’s struggles with its Gemini AI chatbot have reinforced concerns that the search giant is feeling threatened by AI chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite these challenges, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been focusing on “durable cost savings” in 2024, amidst concerns about the company’s leadership and vision.
Pichai has also been reportedly keeping a close watch on the loss of key talent to rivals, especially Apple.
Meta’s aggressive recruitment drive and AI investments could further intensify the competition between the two tech giants in the AI space, with Meta aiming to position itself as a dominant player.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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