Zuckerberg Squandered His AI Talent. Now He’s Spending Billions To Replace It.

Forbes

At Meta, a chaotic culture and lack of vision have led to brain drain, with rivals saying its AI talent is lackluster. But Zuckerberg’s frenzied hiring spree hasn’t stopped the departures.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2025/08/13/zuckerberg-squandered-his-ai-talent-now-hes-spending-billions-to-replace-it/  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00Today on Forbes, Zuckerberg squandered his AI talent. Now he's spending billions to replace it.

00:08Meta was teaming with top AI talent, until it wasn't. Years before Mark Zuckerberg's

00:14high-profile shopping spree, the company employed the researchers and engineers

00:18that would ultimately depart to start major AI companies. Founders of Perplexity, Mistral,

00:24Fireworks AI and World Labs all hailed from the Facebook parents AI lab. And as the AI boom has

00:31spurred the build of ever more capable models, others have decamped to rivals like OpenAI,

00:36Anthropic and Google. The brain drain of the last few years has been tough,

00:42three former Meta AI employees told Forbes. One ex-Meta AI employee said, quote,

00:49they already had the best people and lost them to OpenAI. This is Mark trying to undo the loss

00:54of talent. And now, even as Zuckerberg makes jaw-dropping offers for top-tier AI researchers,

01:01the social media giant continues to lose those that are left.

01:06Today, when it comes to recruiting high-caliber AI researchers, Meta is often an afterthought.

01:12Insiders at some of Silicon Valley's biggest AI companies said that prior to the fresh hiring

01:16of the last few months, Meta's talent largely didn't meet their hiring bar.

01:21A senior executive at one of the major frontier AI companies told Forbes, quote,

01:26we might be interested in hiring some of the new people Mark is hiring now,

01:29but it's been a while since we were particularly interested in the people who were already there.

01:36Google has hired less than two dozen AI employees from Meta since last fall,

01:40according to a person familiar with Google's hiring, compared to the hundreds of AI researchers

01:45and engineers it hired in that time frame overall. That person told Forbes that, quote,

01:50prevailing belief is that Meta didn't have much talent left to poach from.

01:56This has lent an air of desperation to Zuckerberg's attempts to raid the likes of OpenAI and Thinking

02:01Machine Labs, the fledgling startup helmed by former OpenAI CTO Mira Mirati, with nine-figure offers

02:08and promises of near unlimited compute. In at least two cases, the Meta CEO has offered pay packages

02:16worth over $1 billion spread across multiple years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

02:21He reportedly poached at least 18 OpenAI researchers, but many have also turned him down,

02:27betting on bigger impact and better returns on their equity.

02:30Referring to an NFL team and its pursuit of free agents, one AI founder told Forbes, quote,

02:37Meta is the Washington commanders of tech companies. They massively overpay for OK-ish AI scientists,

02:43and then civilians think those are the best AI scientists in the world because they are paid so much.

02:49Meta strongly denied that it has had issues with AI talent and retention.

02:54Spokesperson Ryan Daniels said in a statement, quote,

02:58The underlying facts clearly don't back up this story, but that didn't stop unnamed sources with

03:03agendas from pushing this narrative or Forbes from publishing it.

03:08Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei has said he's spoken to Anthropic employees who have gotten offers from

03:13Meta who didn't take them, adding that his company wouldn't renegotiate employee salaries based on those

03:19offers. Last month on the Big Technology podcast, he said, quote,

03:23If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and hits your name, that doesn't mean you should be

03:28paid 10 times more than the guy next to you who's just as skilled, just as talented.

03:34Anthropic has an 80% retention rate, the strongest among the frontier labs,

03:39according to a May report by VC firm SignalFire. The findings are based on data collected for all

03:45full-time roles, including engineering, sales, and HR, and not AI researchers specifically.

03:51In comparison, DeepMind has 78%, OpenAI 67%, and Meta trails with 64%.

04:01An August report from SignalFire that focused broadly on engineering talent noted that Meta

04:06is aggressively hiring engineers across the company twice as fast as it is losing them.

04:12Jared Reyes, SignalFire's head of developer community, said, quote,

04:16Some outbound movement helps explain why Meta is investing so heavily in rebuilding and expanding

04:21its technical bench. It reflects the intensity of competition for senior AI talent and the pressure

04:27even top companies feel to backfill experience while scaling new initiatives.

04:33For full coverage, check out Rashi Srivastava and Richard Nieva's piece on Forbes.com.

04:40This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.

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