By Shubhangi Chowdhury
In the fierce global race to dominate AI, Mark Zuckerberg seems to be going all in. He’s just pulled in three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich team. Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai are the recently added members to the Meta’s “superintelligence” team, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The timing is interesting. This news comes right after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly accused Zuckerberg of poaching his employees, during a podcast conversation with his brother Jack Altman that dropped on Tuesday.
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Now Meta’s latest hires only add fuel to the fire. There have already been reports claiming Zuckerberg is offering huge compensation packages worth more than $100 million to grab in top AI talent from OpenAI and other rival firms.
Zuckerberg is said to be personally leading Meta’s global AI talent hunt, reaching out directly to top researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs through emails and WhatsApp. According to The Wall Street Journal, he’s been coordinating recruitment through a group chat, “Recruiting Party ” and following up with private dinners at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe.
While Meta recently secured a $14 billion partnership with Scale AI with CEO Alexandr Wang on board, OpenAI co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman rejected the offer.
“I’m really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take him up on [those offers],” said Altman in that same podcast.
While Meta is making bold moves in the AI space, it hasn’t been all smooth sailing internally. The company has reportedly been grappling with staff resignations and delays in rolling out its next-generation AI models compared to its major players like Google, OpenAI, and China’s rising star, DeepSeek.
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But instead of slowing down, Meta seems to be doubling down. Through its new recruitment drive.
In fact, the company is planning to shell out a staggering $65 billion this year alone on capital expenditures to supercharge its AI infrastructure and push its ambitions forward. One of its biggest moves recently is acquiring a massive 49% stake in Scale AI, a data-labeling and AI infrastructure company, for $14.3 billion. That’s a serious signal that Meta isn’t just participating in the AI race—it’s aiming to dominate it.
Reports also suggest that Meta is trying to reposition itself at the forefront of the field by building a specialized team focused on one of the most ambitious goals in tech today: artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is a system with intelligence and reasoning abilities comparable to a human. It’s not just about smart algorithms anymore; it’s about creating machines that can truly think, learn, and adapt like we do.