Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, has weighed in on the competition for top AI talent in Silicon Valley, specifically questioning the strategy of rivals like Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook. Suleyman criticised Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s approach of offering multi-million dollar pay packages, saying that he focused on individuals rather than team building.“I think that Zuck’s taken a particular approach that involves sort of hiring a lot of individuals rather than maybe creating a team, and I don’t really think that’s the right approach,” he said on Bloomberg Podcasts, while talking about the 100 million signing bonuses Meta has been offering engineers. Reports even claimed a few high-level AI researchers also got signing bonuses of up to $250 million.
Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft will not pay such huge amount
Suleyman also indicated that Microsoft AI will never match these astronomical figures. “I don’t think anyone’s matching those things,” Suleyman said, highlighting that the company will instead prioritise selective hiring, strong team culture and incremental growth.Over the last few months, reporters have said that Meta has ‘poached’ engineers and top AI researchers for millions of dollars. Even Microsoft hired Suleyman from Google DeepMind, however, the executive pointed out ‘no poach’ agreement.“There’s certainly no ‘no poach’ agreements, that would not be legal. People can go work for whoever they want to work for,” he said.Earlier this year, Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, and hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang. Similarly, Google also invested $2.4 billion to acquire the leaders of AI coding platform Windsurf.
What Mark Zuckerberg looks for in a candidate
In October this year, a report by Fortune pointed out the type of talent Zuckerberg likes and is likely to hire. According to the report, for Zuckerberg, skills outweigh a traditional college degree as looks for people who have mastered a specific skill and demonstrated the ability to apply it across various business“If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing really well, then they’ve probably gained experience in the art of learning something and taking it to an excellent level, which is generally pretty applicable to other things,” Zuckerberg told Bloomberg last year.
