In an internal memo, Mark Zuckerberg revealed 11 members of his new AI SuperIntelligence Lab that he poached from OpenAI and other tech giants.
The memo, obtained by CNBC and published Monday, lists top engineers and researchers hired to bolster Meta’s AI efforts. It comes months after Zuckerberg began his personal AI talent crusade—one that has blindsided competitors and sparked reports of “The List,” a compilation of the Facebook founder’s recruits he hopes will staff the Meta Superintelligence Lab.
The document names five ex-OpenAI staff that left the company just weeks after The OpenAI Files report discussed deep leadership concerns.
Zuckerberg has been personally reaching out to potential recruits, The Wall Street Journal reported. In his pitch to OpenAI staffers, the Meta CEO offered a $100 million signing bonus and one year compensation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a recent podcast hosted by his brother, Jack.
The lucrative, professional athlete-like job offers come after Meta’s latest AI model, Llama 4, received a cool reaction from consumers and critics. Experts say Zuckerberg’s moves might be a sign of desperation to keep up with competitors.
“Last time Meta released an AI model, it wasn’t as successful as they expected,” Edgar Perez, a corporate trainer on AI and other cutting-edge technologies, told Fortune.
Zuckerberg has made good on his promise to bolster Meta’s AI efforts in recent months, hiring Scale AI’s ex-CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to help lead the Superintelligence team he’s assembling. Perez said the next challenge for Meta is to make AI reasoning models that can contend with products like DeepSeek’s R1, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and OpenAI’s o1 series.
“At the end of the day, what Mark Zuckerberg wants to incorporate in Meta is AI agents,” Perez said. “To be able to be successful, [the AI agent] needs to reason. Let’s say, if you want to develop a task in a company, or if a customer would like to do some task through Meta, they need to decompose a number of steps. And those steps will need to be managed through a reasoning model. That’s not something that Llama, at the moment, can do, and that’s why they need to refine.”
But, even with the allure of a nine-figure salary, Perez said Zuckerberg’s offer may still be hard to swallow for someone working at a place with a strong company culture.
