Mark Zuckerberg on Meta’s alleged $100-200 million pay packages

Mark Zuckerberg has referred to as reviews on Meta’s million greenback pay packages to poach synthetic intelligence employees from rivals “inaccurate”, however didn’t elaborate on the precise numbers in an interview with The Info.

Chatting with the publication on reviews of “$100-200 million” pay packages for Meta’s “Superintelligence” AI workforce, Mark Zuckerkberg referred to as it a “sizzling market” including that it makes “sense” to spend huge on gaining the fitting expertise.

Worth for AI expertise ‘aggressive’, says Mark Zuckerberg

“Numerous the specifics which were reported aren’t correct by themselves. However it’s a highly regarded market,” the 41-year-old CEO of Meta acknowleged, including, “There is a small variety of researchers, that are the most effective, who’re in demand by the entire totally different labs. So I believe that it actually is sort of aggressive.”

He additional famous that within the huge scheme of AI bills, whereby the trade is pushing “tons of of billions of {dollars} on compute and constructing out a number of gigawatt of clusters.. it actually does make sense to compete tremendous arduous” to get the highest 50-70 researchers to construct your workforce.

Mark Zuckerberg explains Meta’s profitable AI pay packages

Explaining the choice to supply profitable pay packages to AI recuits, the tech billionaire additionally famous that AI doesn’t want a “large workforce”, stating, “You really sort of need the smallest group of people that can match the entire thing of their head. So there’s simply an absolute premium for the most effective and most proficient folks.”

“So it sort of is smart whenever you sort of give it some thought that, from that perspective, the quantity that’s being spent to recruit the folks is definitely nonetheless fairly small in comparison with the general funding and all whenever you discuss tremendous intelligence,” he added.

On poaching allegations, and ‘discomfort’ in interactions with Sam Altman

When requested about any discomfort in interactions with Sam Altman after the poaching allegations, Mark Zuckerberg was flippant. “I imply, what would I say? We’re increase this new workforce from scratch, and there is like, 5 or 6 locations on this planet which have a variety of nice researchers. You realize, Meta, in fact, is one in all them. And a part of what we’re doing is pulling over a variety of the important thing of us into the brand new efforts as nicely,” he defined.

“However we’re additionally doing a giant recruiting push, so we’re not attempting to focus on anybody individually. I wish to make it possible for I personally get to know the entire high researchers within the trade. In order that means, whether or not it is now or sooner or later, if there is a good alternative to work collectively, then we will, we will make that occur,” he added.

Meta constructing gigawatt-size information facilities: What’s Prometheus?

In a put up on Threads, Zuckerberg additionally introduced that Meta is constructing a number of large information facilities to energy its AI ambitions, with the primary one — referred to as Prometheus, primarily based in Ohio — anticipated to return on-line subsequent 12 months.

“We’re constructing a number of extra titan clusters as nicely,” he added, hinting that every one their information centres can be named after Greek titans of delusion. Zuckerberg described the information facilities as multigigawatt “clusters”. The most important such facility is being inbuilt Richland Parish, Louisiana, which the Fb co-founder has touted as being “practically the scale of Manhattan”.

This comes after Meta in April stated it might spend as a lot as $72 billion on capex, with give attention to AI and the information facilities used to coach and run the fashions.

Until July 15, Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs workforce consists of researchers poached from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and different high AI corporations. Large names comparable to Scale AI co-founder Alexandr Wang as chief AI officer; former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, AI startup founder Daniel Gross, and Apple Inc.’s Ruoming Pang, are all on board for reported exorbitant pay packages, based on a Bloomberg report.

In his put up, Zuckerberg reiterated that Meta goes to speculate “tons of of billions of {dollars}” into information middle capability to construct superintelligence. “We’ve the capital from our enterprise to do that,” he wrote.