AI researcher ‘turns down $1bn pay offer from Mark Zuckerberg’
Mark Zuckerberg has been personally leading a recruitment drive to attract developers to his new AI lab - Laure Andrillon/REUTERS
A tech worker has reportedly turned down a $1bn (£750m) pay deal to join Mark Zuckerberg’s artificial intelligence (AI) unit amid an escalating war for talent in Silicon Valley.
Mr Zuckerberg’s Meta reportedly offered several researchers who work at Thinking Machines, a San Francisco-based AI start-up, packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to join the social media giant.
One of those packages would have been worth as much as $1bn over several years, according to a report from Wired, while some researchers were also offered between $200m and $500m over a four-year period. Most deals included an award worth $50m to $100m in the first year.
So far, no staff at the start-up have taken up an offer from Meta. Last month, Thinking Machines raised $2bn at a $12bn valuation, despite having no product.
A spokesman for Meta disputed the claims, although confirmed it had made a “handful” of offers to staff at Thinking Machines.
“We made offers only to a handful of people at Thinking Machines and while there was one sizeable offer, the details are off,” the spokesman said.
Thinking Machines was founded by 36-year-old Mira Murati, a former OpenAI executive who has become one of the powerful women in tech since launching the company.
Nobody that works for Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines has yet taken up a Meta offer - Kimberly White/Getty Images
AI arms race
The eye-watering pay offers come amid an AI arms race, with tech giants trying to tempt leading AI scientists and programmers to join their efforts over those of rivals.
Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI which owns ChatGPT, previously claimed Meta had offered his staff deals worth as much as $100m.
Mr Zuckerberg has been personally leading a recruitment drive to attract leading scientists and developers to a new lab within Meta in a race against rivals to build highly powerful AI tools.
The Meta chief executive has reportedly been reaching out to dozens of targets with personalised WhatsApp messages and bumper pay deals.
Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on AI data centres that will be used to help create more powerful machine-learning tools that Mr Zuckerberg has claimed could soon transform the economy and society.
Mark Zuckerberg poached Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead his team in a $14bn deal - David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
He has also already recruited around 50 leading researchers and experts for a new “superintelligence” lab within Meta, after growing frustrated at the lack of progress by his own engineers.
Earlier this year, Meta delayed a major update to its AI technology, dubbed Behemoth.
Mr Zuckerberg also engineered a $14.3bn deal to poach Alexandr Wang, the founder of AI business Scale AI, to lead his new team, acquiring a 49pc stake in the start-up in the process.
Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day's agenda from The Telegraph - direct to your inbox seven days a week.
