Google DeepMind CEO says Meta's AI talent war is rational because they are behind

India Today

4 days ago

The battle for the brightest minds in artificial intelligence has reached fever pitch, and Meta appears determined to buy its way to the top. The company has been aggressively poaching talent from rivals, including DeepMind, and dangling packages worth hundreds of millions.But DeepMind's cofounder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis, isn't particularly impressed. In an interview this week, he described Mark Zuckerberg's tactics as 'rational' but also suggested that those motivated purely by money are unlikely to be the ones shaping the future of AI.advertisementEarlier this year, Meta quietly launched its Superintelligence Labs, a new project led by two high-profile Silicon Valley figures: former Scale AI boss Alexander Wang and Nat Friedman, who previously ran GitHub. The initiative was created to inject fresh life into Meta's AI ambitions after its Llama models, released in April, failed to set the world alight.
Zuckerberg himself is said to have been personally involved in the talent hunt, reportedly luring some of the biggest names in AI research with stratospheric offers, packages as high as $200 million a year have been whispered about in industry circles.The results are already showing: researchers from OpenAI, Google and even Apple have resigned to join Meta, raising eyebrows across the tech world.Hassabis, however, believes the deeper motivation for top scientists goes beyond pay cheques. 'There's a strategy that Meta is taking right now,' he told Bloomberg. 'I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what it can do, and understand the consequences, both good and bad, are mostly doing it to be at the frontier, so they can help influence how that plays out and steward the technology safely into the world.'Meta, he noted, 'right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they'll manage to get back there. And it's probably rational, what they're doing from their perspective, because they're behind and they need to do something. But I think there are more important things than just money. Of course, one has to pay people market rates, and those continue to go up.'The DeepMind CEO also reflected on how dramatically the AI field has changed in just over a decade. 'We couldn't raise any money. I didn't pay myself for a couple of years,' he said of DeepMind's early years.'Now,' he added with a touch of incredulity, 'interns are being paid what we raised as our entire first seed round.' The comment underlines just how much the AI gold rush has distorted valuations and salaries as tech firms race to be first to artificial general intelligence (AGI).For Hassabis, the current frenzy of hiring and spending misses a fundamental point: the real prize lies in being at the cutting edge of research, not in cashing in. DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, has built a reputation for scientific breakthroughs, from mastering Go to solving protein structures, and Hassabis clearly sees that mission as more compelling than stock options alone.advertisementMeta, meanwhile, is betting that an infusion of top-tier researchers will allow it to catch up in the generative AI race, and perhaps leapfrog rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic and, indeed, DeepMind.Whether Zuckerberg's megabucks approach works remains to be seen. But for now, at least one leading voice in AI believes there's more to the future of the field than a blank cheque.- EndsMust Watch