Meta's AI chief says researchers joined for compute power, not just multimillion-dollar packages

Meta Didn't Win Top A.I. Talent With Cash Alone, Says MSL Chief Alexandr Wang

Meta's A.I. chief pushes back on claims the company simply bought its way into the race. Meta spared no expense in building up a new A.I. team last year, shelling out multimillion-dollar pay packages to poach researchers at the heart of its superintelligence strategy. But those who joined weren't driven by money alone, according to Alexandr Wang, Meta's A.I. chief who joined from his startup, Scale AI. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters "It's an incorrect assumption to think that the researchers are just money-motivated," said Wang during an episode of the Core Memory Podcast published yesterday (May 13). "For most of them, actually, the financial prospects of them staying wherever they were looked very good as well." Wang himself was one of Meta's most expensive hires. The 29-year-old joined the company's nascent Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) team last June, after Meta acquired a 49 percent stake in Scale AI -- the data-labeling startup he previously led -- in a deal valued at $14.3 billion. Prior to that, Wang had been in talks with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had grown increasingly "AGI-pilled," dissatisfied with the progress of Meta's Llama 4 model and eager to reset the firm's A.I. trajectory, said Wang. Wang now oversees MSL, which is divided into four groups. The largest, still unnamed, focuses on advanced A.I. research and includes talent from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI. Meta allegedly offered some OpenAI researchers signing bonuses of up to $100 million, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed last year. Wang pushed back on the idea that Meta simply spent its way into the A.I. race, calling it one of the biggest "narrative violations, or maybe differences between external perception and what the day-to-day inside is like." The perception, he said, partly stems from how quickly Meta moved. "When I got in, I knew if we wanted to build great models, we needed to have the team yesterday, so we had to just go and blitz it and do it very, very quickly." Instead, Wang argued, it's MSL's culture that attracts talent. He pointed to high compute per researcher, streamlined teams, and a willingness to back ambitious research bets as key draws. Still, Meta's hiring spree has rubbed some industry figures the wrong way. Altman, who was once friends with Wang and even lived with him during the COVID-19 pandemic, has reportedly described Meta's behavior as "somewhat distasteful." Ashlee Vance, host of the Core Memory Podcast, told Wang that the OpenAI chief "did not have flattering things to say" about him ahead of the episode. Tensions like these are nothing new in Silicon Valley. Altman has also taken aim at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and is currently in the midst of a California trial stemming from a lawsuit brought by Elon Musk, one of OpenAI's co-founders. "I think some of this is unfortunate," said Wang of the industry's rivalries. "My real hope is that all these animosities subside over time and then people sort of come together and realize that we are building this incredibly important technology." Criticism from Yann LeCun Wang has also faced criticism from Yann LeCun, the prominent researcher who left Meta last year after more than a decade shaping its A.I. strategy. In a January Financial Times interview, LeCun described Wang as "young" and "inexperienced." "Yann is a notable, very outspoken person, and I think everyone always knows what Yann is thinking," Wang said. The two appear to have since reconciled: they met in India a few weeks after the interview, where LeCun congratulated Wang on MSL's recent Muse Spark model release. Wang also defended his background, noting his early experience as a software engineer at Addepar and Quora before founding Scale AI at age 19. As for criticism tied to his age, he remains unfazed. "People have said this my whole time in Silicon Valley." More broadly, Wang said, public scrutiny comes with the territory for high-profile A.I. leaders. "It can be frustrating, but I choose to channel it into the work that we're doing and what we put out there."

Meta's AI Chief Rejects 'Incorrect' Claims Of Mark Zuckerberg's Big-Money Talent Poaching: 'People Joined

On the "Core Memory" podcast with tech journalists Ashlee Vance and Kylie Robison, on Wednesday, Wang addressed the claims that Meta has been aggressively recruiting top AI researchers from competitors, allegedly offering up to $100 million. He dismissed the idea that these researchers were primarily driven by financial incentives. "I think it's like an incorrect assumption to think that, like the researchers are just money motivated or anything," Wang said. Wang emphasized that the recruits were attracted by other factors, such as the opportunity to have a large amount of computing power at their disposal. "People joined because there was high compute per researcher, so they could make more progress than maybe they would be able to make it wherever they were before," he explained. Wang also stressed the importance of showing recruits that Meta genuinely cared about their specific research directions. "And it was a very individualized recruiting process," he added. In June, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Alexandr Wang's Scale AI and appointed him to lead its SuperIntelligence Lab. Meta's Intense AI Talent Recruitment Chen revealed that the competition for top AI talent has become so fierce that CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally delivered homemade soup to researchers he hoped to recruit from OpenAI. Chen said Meta Platforms spends around $10 billion annually on AI talent and has aggressively targeted OpenAI employees, though several of his direct reports declined Meta's offers. In October, Meta hired Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati's AI startup Thinking Machines Lab. Tulloch reportedly accepted a compensation package worth up to $1.5 billion over six years after Meta failed to acquire the startup and instead targeted several of its employees for recruitment. Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Image via Shutterstock Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs To add Benzinga News as your preferred source on Google, click here.