Short answer: Jordan Metzner says Zuckerberg announced a team of researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind and Sesame. Sam Nadler says Meta went into win-at-all-costs mode, hiring 11 leaders, and expects it to leapfrog competitors.
Watch this answer from Episode 2 (starts at 23:20) · Episode 2 notes and transcript
From Episode 2: We Built an AI SEO Machine That Writes and Publishes Itself, starting at 23:20.
Sam Nadler [23:20]: Cool. Yeah. Let's jump into the AI news of the day. Let me know what topics are exciting for you.
Jordan Metzner [23:29]: So, yeah, it's been a crazy week of AI news. I think, last week, we talked a little bit about it, but, Facebook acquired 50% of Scale AI in order to get Alexandr Wang over to Facebook. But Zuckerberg announced this week that he's put together kind of an entire team of AI researchers. And, yeah, I just think it's super interesting. I mean, there was the rumors about $100,000,000 salaries. Who knows, like, what they actually were? He announced who these researchers are. They came from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Sesame. And, yeah, I just think it just shows, like, how cutthroat this, AI war is, how important it is to the biggest companies in the world, and how it's just like the early innings. I mean, we're just the way beginnings. And I think even, like, more interesting than that maybe is, just like this fight for talent across these top tier companies. Some of the anti compete laws that exist in California all started when, Apple and Google were poaching talent from each other. And, now here we are seeing kind of like, Facebook meta poach talent from OpenAI, and I'm sure we're just gonna keep seeing it all across the bay because, the demand is so high. But So I think that's the first piece of crazy news.
Sam Nadler [24:54]: It's absolutely crazy. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, at a high level, Meta was tired of playing catch up and just, went into win at all cost modes and decided to, buy the entire playing field, basically. I think, I may be mistaken here, but they hired 11 cut leaders from mainly OpenAI and Google. But, a lot of the people who built GPT-4o, o3, o4-mini, Gemini 2.5, I believe. So it's just a huge power grab. I think the question is, does it matter? And absolutely, I think it matters. I think it's, probably gonna have a huge impact. I'm guessing Meta's gonna leapfrog and be one of kind of the top contenders in a very short amount of time. I could be wrong, but, it's it's a very aggressive play.
Jordan Metzner [25:48]: Yeah. I think the talent race is cutthroat. I think today or yesterday came out that two product owners from Anthropic who built Claude Code, which is came out a week ago, has been really popular. Went to Cursor. Right? Yeah. Just went to Cursor. So, I mean, this feels kind of like, baseball or basketball with, like, players switching teams in real time in the middle of the season. But the offers would seem to be probably pretty big, and, it seems like, people can't turn them down. But, again, Alex Wang, he's been on the job maybe a week, so it's just, like, the early days, it seems.
