Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission for his company to be the first to reach — generally considered to mean AI that’s better than all humans at all knowledge work.
It’s a nebulous and likely far-out concept that some analysts say may not immediately benefit the company’s core business. Yet Zuckerberg is shelling out huge sums to build an all-star team of researchers and engineers to beat OpenAI and other rivals to it.
Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree, which has reportedly included multimillion-dollar pay packages to lure top talent away from key rivals, has kicked off a talent race within the AI industry. Last month, OpenAI CEO,Sam Altman Claimed Meta was offering his employees $100 million signing bonuses to switch companies. And just this week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked during an earnings call about his company’s status in the AI talent war, a sign that Wall Street is now also invested in the competition.
The stakes are high for Zuckerberg — after Meta’s pivot to the metaverse fell flat, he’s reoriented the company around AI in hopes of being a leader in the next transformational technology wave. The company has invested billions in data centers and chips to power its AI ambitions that it’s now under pressure to deliver on. Unlike other tech giants, Meta doesn’t have a cloud computing business to generate immediate revenue from those infrastructure investments. And the company is coming from.
“That’s the Llama 4 lesson: You can have hundreds of thousands of (GPU chips), but if you don’t have the right team developing the model, it doesn’t matter,” said D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria.somewhat in releasing the largest version of its new Llama 4 AI model.
Source:CNN
