To hire top engineers, Mark Zuckerberg cooked them soup and delivered it by hand
Tech companies including Meta, OpenAI and Google are struggling to acquire top AI talent. While all the companies have offered millions of dollars to get people on board, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken things into his own hands… literally, by making soup.
The race for artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum. Tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Apple are struggling to bring on board the best people to boost their AI development. We have already heard about offers worth millions of dollars from these companies. But now, recruiting efforts have entered a new chapter — one where billionaire Mark Zuckerberg makes the soup.
Mark Zuckerberg and Meta race to poach OpenAI
OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer, Mark Chen, has revealed the interesting strategy deployed by the Meta CEO to lure key talent from its AI rival. On a podcast with tech podcaster Ashley Vance, Chen claimed that most of his team members have been offered a role by Zuckerberg.
According to Mark Chen, despite making some big offers, Mark Zuckerberg’s company failed to win the hearts of his team members. “They went after half of my direct reports, and they all declined,” he said. “They have $10 billion a year to spend on talent,” Chen said.
Mark Zuckerberg delivers handmade soup to potential recruits
Despite Meta’s vast financial resources, Chen said that OpenAI has managed to retain many prominent researchers because of the company’s mission and vision. In response to this, Mark Zuckerberg did something unexpected. Mark Chen said, “Zak actually went and handed out soup to people he was trying to recruit from us. Like, just to show how far he would go.”
At first, OpenAI’s chief researcher was surprised to see Mark Zuckerberg cooking soup to lure employees, but it soon became clear that this strategy was quite clever. Chen explained, “Over time, I’ve updated myself that these things can be effective in their own way, right?”
OpenAI copies Mark Zuckerberg’s soup strategy
It seems that Mark Chen and OpenAI decided that the best way to manage this soup crisis would be for potential recruits to bring their own soup. But unlike the handmade soups created by Zuckerberg, Chen took a more luxurious approach. “If you get a Michelin-star soup it’s even better,” he said, revealing that he orders it from a popular Korean-soup restaurant in Silicon Valley.