Mark Zuckerberg is writing personal emails to AI researchers at Google’s DeepMind to recruit them: report

• Mark Zuckerberg appears to be pulling out all the stops to recruit AI talent for Meta.
• A report from The Information says he’s been luring researchers from Google’s DeepMind with personal emails.
• Meta has also been offering jobs to candidates without holding any interviews, the report says.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to be stepping up his company’s efforts to woo and hire AI talent.

Zuckerberg has been recruiting artificial-intelligence researchers from Google’s DeepMind with personally written emails, a report from The Information says, citing two individuals who saw the messages.

One of the unnamed individuals told The Information that Zuckerberg wrote to them about how important AI was to Meta and said he hoped they’d join Meta to work with him.

And it’s not just emails. The Information’s report says Meta has been offering jobs to candidates without conducting any interviews. The company has also eased its policy of not granting higher salaries to staff with competing job offers, the outlet says.

Meta’s reported recruitment efforts appear to be part of a concerted strategy by Zuckerberg to turn the company into a dominant player in the AI space.

In January, Zuckerberg told The Verge in an interview that Meta would own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.

The chips, which companies use to train and deploy AI models, have become a hot commodity among tech companies.

“We have built up the capacity to do this at a scale that may be larger than any other individual company. I think a lot of people may not appreciate that,” Zuckerberg told The Verge.

Meta has sought to distinguish itself from its rivals, such as OpenAI. The company has been championing an open-source approach toward AI development. In July, Meta released Llama 2, a mostly open-source AI model.

“In terms of investment priorities, AI will be our biggest investment area in 2024 for both engineering and compute resources,” Zuckerberg told investors in an earnings call last year.

Representatives for Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.