Overview
- OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen said Meta tried to recruit about half of his direct reports and that they turned the offers down, crediting strong retention at OpenAI.
- Chen recounted that Mark Zuckerberg personally hand-delivered homemade soup to an OpenAI employee in a bid to lure them to Meta.
- Chen said he has mirrored the tactic by bringing soup to candidates from Meta, at times ordering from the Silicon Valley restaurant Daeho, and he suggested such gestures can be effective.
- Coverage highlights that the competition centers on a very small pool of experts capable of advancing large language models and AGI, often estimated at fewer than 1,000 globally.
- Meta declined to comment; prior reporting cited $100 million signing bonuses to woo OpenAI engineers, and Chen told Fortune that Meta is deploying a “$10 billion” talent budget, a characterization attributed to him.