To stay competitive in the race for artificial intelligence expertise, Meta Platforms is adopting unconventional recruitment tactics. These include offering positions to candidates without interviews and deviating from their usual practice of not increasing pay for employees who receive outside job offers.

The intensity of Meta’s recruitment efforts was highlighted when CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally reached out to researchers from Google’s DeepMind, aiming to bring them onboard. In his emails, Zuckerberg emphasized the critical role of AI at Meta and expressed his desire for collaboration.

Key Points:

• Meta has made job offers to AI researchers without conducting interviews.
• The company has softened its stance on not raising salaries for employees considering leaving.
• Mark Zuckerberg has actively participated in recruiting AI researchers.

Meta is pushing to strengthen its AI capabilities after losing several key personnel who worked on its advanced language models to competitors like DeepMind, OpenAI, and the French startup Mistral.

Zuckerberg’s direct involvement has proven effective in recruitment efforts. Notably, Michal Valko, a former DeepMind researcher now a principal Llama engineer at Meta, acknowledged the personal efforts of Zuckerberg and other senior leaders in his decision to join the company. Meta, however, declined to comment on these strategies.

Education will not tip the scales, but it will help

Despite these efforts, Meta faces ongoing challenges in retaining top AI talent, particularly against competitors like DeepMind and OpenAI, who often offer more substantial compensation packages. Sources indicate that while top AI researchers at Meta can earn between $1 million to $2 million annually, competitors’ offers can be significantly higher.

The turnover has been notable; several authors from key research papers on Meta’s AI models have left the company. This exodus includes vital personnel from the teams behind the Llama models, which are central to Meta’s AI research.

As Meta seeks to replace these losses and further its AI initiatives, about 10% of the company’s open roles are related to AI and its applications. The generative AI group alone is looking to expand by about 100 positions, underlining the strategic importance of AI in Meta’s future. And not all 100 are engineers.

The hiring push comes after a period of general hiring freezes and layoffs at Meta, which included nearly 20,000 employees over the past two years. Meta’s CFO Susan Li recently indicated that payroll expenses are expected to grow as the company continues to hire for high-priority, technical roles.

Furthermore, after laying off hundreds of recruiters in the last two years, Meta has begun contracting recruiters and sourcers on short-term agreements to bolster its hiring efforts, often rehiring those it had previously laid off.

While Meta navigates these recruitment challenges, some AI startups are struggling to maintain momentum, which could potentially ease the competition for AI talent. Nonetheless, Meta’s long-term investment in AI, including developments like PyTorch, and the broad reach of its AI products through its popular apps, remain key selling points in its recruitment discussions.

The more AI entrants enter the stream, the more pressure will be put on the talent pipeline, and companies who serve that need in a meaningful way will be seen as shovel and pan vendors during the gold rush of 49.