Seeing the growing demand for AI across various sectors, companies are actively seeking to hire individuals with expertise in the field. This trend extends to Meta, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly reached out personally via emails to AI talent at Google’s DeepMind, inviting them to join his company’s AI project.
Zuckerberg makes aggressive push to hire AI talents
The information about Zuckerberg personally writing emails to Google DeepMind employees has been provided by two individuals to The Information. While they have requested to keep their identities anonymous, they said that the email from Zuckerberg stresses the importance of AI in his company along with using other persuasive tactics to attract them. They also mentioned that at least one individual has been headhunted by Zuckerberg through his email.
This isn’t the only move Zuckerberg has taken for his AI projects. Recently, Meta announced they would be bypassing traditional interviews and directly offering jobs to qualified individuals in the AI field. Additionally, Meta has increased the salaries of its employees who were considering offers from competing AI companies.
With Meta working on various AI projects, including AI wristbands and integrating AI into Facebook, the need for AI talent is only expected to grow. Considering this, Zuckerberg is going all-out on hiring AI talent. Whether it’s writing personal emails to attract employees from competitors or offering high incentives, Zuckerberg is taking all the necessary steps to become the next big name in the AI industry.
Meta has plans to accumulate more than 340,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs by the end of 2024. This massive investment will allow them to integrate AI into their apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).
Highlighting the importance of these chips, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas shared on the Invest Like the Best podcast that when he tried to recruit a senior researcher from Meta, the response was, “Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs.”
Flexing about the number of chips Meta is going to accumulate, Zuckerberg told The Verge, “We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company.”
Meta isn’t the only company desperate to hire AI talent
The number of skilled AI professionals is very limited compared to the rapid growth of the AI industry. As reported by Fortune, in December 2023, an event that was considered the biggest machine learning conference eventually turned into a recruiting extravaganza.
Considering the growing need for talent, we are likely to see more approaches similar to what Zuckerberg has taken by other companies to hire AI talent.