Within the high-stakes arms race between Meta and OpenAI for AI dominance, the weapon of selection has developed. First, it was limitless compute, then $100 million signing bonuses. Now, the battle has entered a brand new, bizarrely intimate section: soup wars.
Mark Chen, chief analysis officer at OpenAI, stated on a podcast with tech podcaster Ashlee Vance that the recruitment conflict has shifted. In keeping with Chen, Meta has aggressively pursued half of his direct reviews—backed by a $10 billion conflict chest for expertise—however CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added a private contact to the poaching makes an attempt.
Zuckerberg, Chen stated, has personally “hand-cooked” and “hand-delivered” soup to researchers he needed to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn’t a joke, the manager insisted.
“It was shocking to me at the time,” Chen admitted. However in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you have to reply in form. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his personal recruits as he hopes to poach expertise from Meta. Nonetheless, he attracts the road at guide labor.
“No, no, no … It’s better if you get, like, Michelin-star soup,” Chen stated, laughing, noting he outsources the job to a high-end Korean-soup spot within the Valley referred to as Daeho.
“These things can be effective in their own way,” he stated. Chen is even planning a cooking class off-site to lean into the absurdity.
The comfortable theatrics disguise a harsher actuality: The pool of people that can design and prepare cutting-edge massive language fashions is microscopic. Business insiders estimate there are fewer than 1,000 researchers globally with the experience to push the frontier on their very own.
The soup is considerably harking back to earlier tech expertise wars, when Google and Fb tried to outbid one another with free sushi, in-house baristas, and on-campus gyms. This time, although, the dimensions is totally different: liquidity occasions that allow researchers money out fairness early, particular entry to compute, and the promise of affect over how highly effective AI methods that can form the longer term are constructed.
To poach the unpoachable, CEOs are compelled to substitute capital or assets with intimacy. A CEO who turns up at your door with dinner is sending a message: You matter sufficient that I’ll spend my very own time courting you.
Chen, for his half, is utilizing the story to make a broader level about how the expertise conflict truly feels from inside OpenAI. Media protection has typically framed Meta as merely vacuuming up OpenAI’s greatest folks, Chen stated.
He pushed again, saying Meta “went after a lot of people quite unsuccessfully,” and famous that half of his direct reviews all turned the corporate down.
OpenAI’s retention technique, he prompt, is much less about matching Meta dollar-for-dollar and extra about conviction: Researchers keep as a result of they imagine within the lab’s course and its odds of being first to synthetic basic intelligence.
“Even among people who have offers from Meta,” Chen stated, “I haven’t heard anyone say AGI is going to be developed at Meta first.”
