Editor's Column: Zuckerberg is on the hunt for Valley brains working on AI
Silicon Valley smells like panic. And the name of this panic is Mark Zuckerberg. While Apple shyly agrees to integrate third-party AI models into Siri and OpenAI is patching up the holes in the team, Zuckerberg opened an unlimited credit card and went on a real brain hunt.
What is known
Meta has put the "buy all" mode into full gear. Zuckerberg is personally recruiting a new artificial intelligence team of 50 people. And this is not a fantasy - Bloomberg writes it. One of Apple's key engineers, Tom Gunter, has already waved goodbye to Apple Park. It is not officially known whether he joined Meta, but the coincidence is suspicious.
At the same time, OpenAI is falling apart. Their Chief Research Officer, Mark Chen, directly compared the situation in an internal email to "someone breaking into our house and stealing something". Well, Mark, when you pay several times less than your competitors, it's not stealing, it's the market.
Meta, in addition to hunting people, also tried to buy startups in batches - Perplexity, Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machine Labs, Runway AI. It failed. Instead, it managed to acquire Scale AI startup together with its ex-CEO Alexandr Wang, who will now lead the newly created Superintelligence Lab. Wired reported that Meta is offering $100 million to OpenAI employees for the move, and 4 of them have already accepted.
What about Apple and Google?
Apple has a "staff depression". While Zuckerberg is personally recruiting engineers by phone, Cupertino is considering whether it would be easier to simply integrate OpenAI or Anthropic instead of developing Siri in-house. Spoiler alert - this is very bad for employee morale, as the employees who speak up are clear: "This looks like a vote of no confidence in our work."
And when Meta gives out salaries 2-4 times higher, and Google also loses people from the Gemini team, it becomes obvious that this market now resembles not so much a race as a massive brain sale.
What does it all mean?
Zuckerberg makes it clear: profit is a matter of the next decade. Now it's important to carve out a place in the sun in the new "AI Age". Although it reminds me a lot of the "new era of the meta-universe" he used to talk about at every conference 5 years ago. And where is this strange new meta-universe? It doesn't exist. Isn't the same bubble being created now, but with a marketing flavour of artificial intelligence?