In a high-stakes arms race between the two sides Yuan And OpenAI, the weapon of choice for artificial intelligence dominance, has evolved. firstwhich is infinite calculation, Then, $100 million signing bonus. Now, the battle has entered a new, unusually intimate phase: the soup battle.
OpenAI chief research officer Mark Chen said on tech podcast Ashlee Vance’s podcast that the recruiting battle has changed. According to Chen, Meta has aggressively poached half of his direct reports, backed by a $10 billion talent pool, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg has added a personal touch to the poaching attempts.
Chen said Zuckerberg personally “hand-cooked” and “hand-delivered” soup to the researchers he wanted to recruit from OpenAI. The executive insisted it was no joke.
“I was shocked,” Chen admits. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings soup, you have to fight fire with fire. Chen admitted that he has adopted this tactic of giving soup to his new employees because he hopes to poach talent from Meta. However, he drew the line at physical labor.
“No, no, no… it better be like Michelin-starred soup,” Chen laughed, noting that he outsourced the work to a Silicon Valley firm called big lake.
“These things can work in their own way,” he said. Chen even plans to hold off-site cooking classes to learn about this ridiculous phenomenon.
The cozy drama masks a harsher reality: the number of people capable of designing and training cutting-edge large-scale language models is slim to none. Industry insiders estimate Fewer than 1,000 researchers worldwide have the expertise to single-handedly advance cutting-edge technologies.
This soup is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of the war for tech talent, when Google Facebook tried bid against each other Offers free sushi, an in-house barista and an on-campus gym. This time, though, the scale is different: a liquidity event allows researchers to cash out their stake early, gain access to special computing power, and promise to have an impact on building powerful artificial intelligence systems that will shape the future.
To poach those who cannot be poached, CEOs are forced to substitute capital or resources. A CEO having dinner on your doorstep sends a message: You matter, and I will spend my time pursuing you.
Chen uses this story to illustrate from a broader perspective what the battle for talent within OpenAI actually feels like. Chen said media reports often describe Meta as simply sucking away OpenAI’s best talent.
He countered that Mehta “went after a lot of people without success,” including half of his direct reports who turned down the company.
He said OpenAI’s retention strategy is not about a one-size-fits-all approach to Meta, but about belief: Researchers stay because they believe in the lab’s direction and its potential to become the first general artificial intelligence.
“Even among those who received invitations to Meta,” Chen said, “I didn’t hear anyone say that AGI would be developed at Meta first.”