Meta is ramping up its pursuit of AI dominance — and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally leading the charge. Rather than posting open job listings, Zuckerberg has compiled a private list of elite AI researchers from institutions like MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon, offering compensation packages rumored to exceed $100 million. These candidates, often friends and former colleagues, have rare expertise in niche AI fields like speech recognition and robotics — skills now in hot demand.

Convincing them to join Meta, however, is no easy feat. Meta’s inconsistent track record in AI, including the bumpy rollout of Llama 4 and controversies around chatbot content and training data, has made top researchers wary. Still, the company is working hard to rebuild credibility. It recently invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and brought on co-founder Alexandr Wang to spearhead its superintelligence research.

The race for AI supremacy has become an arms race of talent acquisition. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all aggressively poaching top researchers and even entire companies to build their AI teams. Meta’s targeted recruiting strategy — led by Zuckerberg himself — signals how critical human capital has become in this next phase of the AI wars. With billions also pouring into data infrastructure, the future of AI leadership may come down to which company can build the smartest team, not just the smartest models.