Kathmandu. In an effort to lure AI talent away from major rivals, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly spent months compiling a list of the world’s leading AI engineers and researchers in order to prepare to offer attractive salary packages to prospective hires.

For weeks, Silicon Valley has been discussing the Meta CEO’s efforts to entice elite AI talent, notably by providing compensation packages of up to $100 million.

The Wall Street Journal claims that Zuckerberg has personally contacted targeted candidates.

With competitors like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon investing billions of dollars in AI research and product development, Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been vying for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence. When Meta postponed the planned release of its main AI model, Behemoth, last month, concerns were raised regarding the company’s AI development trajectory.

Meta is placing its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, in control of the company’s “superintelligence team”—an internal lab dedicated to Meta’s efforts to create a hypothetical AI system that is more intelligent than humans—after paying $14 billion for a stake in Scale AI earlier this month.

For $2.7 billion last year, Google acquired the stockholders of Character. AI, a chatbot service that lets users have private discussions with various AI characters.

Recent graduates of prestigious PhD programs at institutions like Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley are among those on “the list,” as Zuckerberg’s slate is referred to in Silicon Valley. Many have exchanged notes regarding Meta’s hiring practices and are currently working for rival AI companies, such as OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind project.

According to a recruit who has had direct communication with Zuckerberg, his objective seems to be a “transfusion from the country’s top AI labs.” Zuckerberg and at least two other top Meta executives created a group WhatsApp discussion called “Recruiting Party” to discuss possible hiring. The Wall Street Journal claims that the CEO of Meta has been searching through academic papers in an effort to personally identify individuals.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has criticized Zuckerberg’s active hiring practices, calling the reported signing bonuses and remuneration packages “crazy.”

During an appearance on his brother Jack’s Uncapped podcast, Altman stated, “I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.” “I don’t think a great culture will be established if the strategy is to offer a lot of upfront, guaranteed compensation, and that is the reason you tell someone to join, like the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work and not the mission.”