Tech giants are going all out to recruit top-notch talent in the artificial intelligence field. Billionaire leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin are personally contacting candidates to entice them into joining their respective companies. According to a report, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms Inc, has been sending handwritten notes to AI researchers at DeepMind, a rival lab owned by Google, in an effort to woo them to Meta. Similarly, Brin, the co-founder of Google, personally made a phone call to an employee who was planning to leave for OpenAI, offering a higher salary and other benefits to persuade them to stay. Meta is even extending job offers to AI talent without conducting interviews and bending its policy of not increasing the salary of an existing employee who intends to join a competitor. Zuckerberg's personal outreach has proven successful, with one DeepMind engineer, Michal Valko, recently announcing his move to Meta and crediting Zuckerberg for his involvement in the decision. Meta has been criticized for offering lower salary packages compared to other Silicon Valley companies.

While OpenAI reportedly pays prized recruits between $5 million and $10 million, mostly through stock, Meta's offerings range from $1 million to $2 million annually. However, despite this, Meta's median compensation for machine learning and AI engineers, including bonus and equity, stands at about $400, 000 per year. Tech companies are reallocating resources towards AI development, with special focus on chatbots and language models. Engineering teams are being offered lucrative packages, sometimes even in the seven-figure range, to incentivize group defections from one company to another. Amidst all this competition, a chip-recruiting company president shared an example of an AI engineering manager who left Microsoft for a startup, despite a lower base salary, due to the promise of stock options worth an estimated $40 million in the future.