Mark Zuckerberg is writing to top AI talent, offering ₹860 crore pay packages: report | Trending

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent the last few months personally reaching out to the smartest AI minds and offering them as much as $100 million or ₹860 crore, in an attempt to catch up in the artificial intelligence race, a report by the Wall Street Journal said.

The tech leader is personally reaching out to hundreds of researchers, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to convince them to join his new Superintelligence lab.

Zuckerberg is willing to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to onboard these people, making them some of the most expensive hires in the industry.

Apart from offering $100 million packages to some people, he has also spent $14 billion for a stake in AI startup Scale and its CEO Alexandr Wang, who is slated to run his new AI team. The 28-year-old is now one of the most lucrative hires in history of the tech industry.

The report claimed that Zuckerberg has also connected with Aravind Srinivas, a co-founder of Indian origin, and offered to buy Perplexity, an AI search startup. The Meta CEO has also reached out to OpenAI employees, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever, but Sam Altman claims that none of his best people have decided to go with him.

Zuckerberg’s hands on approach

The messages directly from Zuckerberg have surprised people, some of whom did not believe it was really the Meta CEO reaching out to them and ended up not responding to the emails they considered hoaxes.

Those who have turned him down have claimed his vague concept of a “superintelligence” achieving a team of 50 lacks a specific enough execution plan.

However, Zuckerberg has taken a hands-on approach to recruiting top AI researchers, believing it’s where he can have the greatest impact at Meta. After convincing candidates that the outreach is genuinely from him, he often hosts them at his homes in Palo Alto or Lake Tahoe. He stays involved throughout the hiring process, even planning where they’ll sit.