Mark Zuckerberg 'recruits' Google DeepMind researchers via personal emails - The Information

The head of Meta is looking for talent in the field of artificial intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg writes personal emails to AI specialists at Google DeepMind to lure them to Meta, reports The Information citing two people who have seen the messages.

One of the sources said that Zuckerberg wrote to researchers that artificial intelligence is very important for Meta and expressed hope that they would join the company. Additionally, some candidates were offered jobs without interviews.

The aggressive recruiting efforts seem to be part of a coordinated strategy aimed at making Meta a dominant player in the AI field. In January, Zuckerberg stated that by the end of 2024, the company plans to have over 340,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processors (according to analysts at Raymond James, Nvidia sells H100 chips for prices ranging from $25,000 to $30,000, and on eBay they could cost over $40,000 - if Meta paid the minimum, it would have spent around $9 billion on this), as well as that Meta's computing infrastructure will include "almost 600,000 computing equivalents of H100, if other graphics processors are included.".

Meta is also seeking to stand out among competitors, such as OpenAI, with its open-source approach - in July, the company released a public version of its large language model Llama 2.

"In terms of investment priorities, artificial intelligence will be our largest area of investment in 2024 for both engineering and computing resources," Zuckerberg told investors during a earnings call last year.