Hot Industry Attracts Mark Zuckerberg’s Personal Letter to Potential Candidates Without Interviews
CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, is personally reaching out to attract and recruit talent in the AI field. Specifically, Zuckerberg is targeting AI researchers working at Google’s DeepMind division. According to The Information, Zuckerberg has directly written handwritten letters to invite potential candidates to work at Meta.
One recipient of such a letter revealed to The Information that Zuckerberg’s letter emphasized the importance of AI for Meta, and Mark hopes that they can join Meta to work with his team.
But the personal letter is not all. According to The Information, Meta extends job offers to candidates and asserts that they will not need to undergo any interviews.
These powerful recruitment efforts by Meta appear to be part of Zuckerberg’s plan to establish the company as a major player in the AI field.
In January, Zuckerberg stated in an interview with The Verge that Meta would own over 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.
These chips will be used by the company to train and deploy AI models, which have become a highly competitive area within tech companies.
“We have built the ability to do things like this at a much larger scale than any other private company. I think a lot of people may not appreciate that,” says Zuckerberg.
Meta is also seeking to differentiate itself from competing rivals such as OpenAI. The company is at the forefront of embracing an open-source approach to AI development. In June, Meta introduced Llama 2, a famous open-source AI model.
“We are very confident that we are leading the way,” he said. “We have pioneered many techniques in developing large language models and have recently established a new AI creative group. This will likely be the area that I, CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Product Director Chris Cox will focus on in the future.”
It is worth mentioning that Meta is not the only company making efforts to recruit talent in the AI field. This week, Microsoft announced that it has hired two out of three founders of Inflection – one of the most famous AI startups in the US. Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will now oversee Microsoft AI, a department responsible for consumer-focused AI services, including the Copilot chatbot, Bing search engine, and Edge browser.
Microsoft’s latest recruitment drive, following its $13 billion investment in OpenAI and its recent closer relationship with France’s Mistral, highlights the company’s intention to ally with ambitious AI startups to dominate the market. Microsoft also strongly supports Inflection.
The “AI arms race” has helped Microsoft become the world’s most valuable public company with a market cap of $3.1 trillion. Google, its archrival, is once again lamenting the battle for talent.
Currently, even relatively young engineers at leading research companies like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic can request seven-figure salaries. Many senior engineers can earn up to $10 million.
Jordan Jacobs, a managing partner at Radical Ventures, which has invested in around 50 global AI startups, says, “There is no doubt that we are witnessing a massive talent war. At the top of the pyramid are those who can build platform models. Very few people can do that, and organizations are willing to spend money to attract them.”
However, not everyone wants to work for wealthy tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Zeki Research, a company that tracks 140,000 top AI scientists and engineers at 20,000 businesses in over 90 countries, has noticed an increasing desire to work outside the US.
The United Arab Emirates, some Northern European countries, and South Korea are emerging as “importers” of AI scientific talent. Some leading national industrial companies, including Siemens in Germany, Samsung in South Korea, and ASML in the Netherlands, have also recruited a significant number of renowned AI engineers.
“I think this is just a fiercely competitive time to work in the tech industry,” says Mustafa Suleyman.
Source: Business Today