Meta Invests $14 Billion in Scale AI, Recruits Alexandr Wang to Lead New Superintelligence Lab

Meta spent $14 billion to acquire nearly half of Scale AI and to lure its cofounder Alexandr Wang to lead a new AI team, Business Insider reported. " The lab recruited top AI researchers from rival companies, including former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, who helps lead the development of AI products, Ruoming Pang, who was the head of Apple's foundation model team, and Trapit Bansal, a former top researcher at OpenAI.

Meta made $100 million compensation packages to top AI researchers during the AI talent war.

He added that for most recruits the financial prospects of them staying wherever they were looked very good as well. Instead, Wang said people joined Meta because there was high compute per researcher. Recruits were motivated by great talent density and a truly cracked group that was pretty small.

Meta's SuperIntelligence Lab recruited top AI researchers from rival companies as part of an effort that went beyond compensation. Wang said Meta was going to give recruits the resources and freedom to make very bold research bets.

OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen said that Zuckerberg hand-delivered homemade soup to an unnamed OpenAI employee. Chen told Vance that he has also delivered soup to people we've been recruiting from Meta. Wang said he didn't think the soup was homemade.

He stated that part of the premise of building this lab was that we had to show everyone that we really, really cared about this technology and we cared about their specific research directions and what they were working on and it was a very individualized recruiting process.

Wang, who cofounded Scale AI, was viewed as one of the top prizes in the AI talent war. The individualized recruiting process reflected the intense competition for leading AI talent across the industry.