Within the high-stakes arms race between Meta and OpenAI for AI dominance, the weapon of selection has advanced. 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, mentioned on a podcast with tech podcaster Ashlee Vance that the recruitment struggle has shifted. Based on Chen, Meta has aggressively pursued half of his direct stories—backed by a $10 billion struggle chest for expertise—however CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added a private contact to the poaching makes an attempt.
Zuckerberg, Chen mentioned, 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 surprising to me on the time,” Chen admitted. However in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, it’s essential to reply in variety. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his personal recruits as he hopes to poach expertise from Meta. Nevertheless, he attracts the road at handbook labor.
“No, no, no … It’s higher in the event you get, like, Michelin-star soup,” Chen mentioned, laughing, noting he outsources the job to a high-end Korean-soup spot within the Valley referred to as Daeho.
“These items might be efficient in their very own means,” he mentioned. Chen is even planning a cooking class off-site to lean into the absurdity.
The comfy 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 size is completely 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 long run are constructed.
To poach the unpoachable, CEOs are pressured to substitute capital or sources 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 struggle truly feels from inside OpenAI. Media protection has typically framed Meta as merely vacuuming up OpenAI’s greatest individuals, Chen mentioned.
He pushed again, saying Meta “went after lots of people fairly unsuccessfully,” and famous that half of his direct stories all turned the corporate down.
OpenAI’s retention technique, he instructed, is much less about matching Meta dollar-for-dollar and extra about conviction: Researchers keep as a result of they consider within the lab’s route and its odds of being first to synthetic common intelligence.
“Even amongst individuals who have affords from Meta,” Chen mentioned, “I haven’t heard anybody say AGI goes to be developed at Meta first.”
