"Top AI Talent Drawn by More Than Just Salaries, Says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg"

Zuckerberg Says Meta’s AI Talent Not Driven by Pay Alone, Highlights Compute Power and Autonomy

July 16, 2025 — Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has dismissed the notion that top artificial intelligence researchers are joining the company solely for lucrative pay packages. Instead, he pointed to Meta's unparalleled computing resources and the autonomy offered to researchers as the primary draws.

In an interview with The Information, Zuckerberg said that while compensation plays a role, it's not the decisive factor in attracting talent from tech giants like Apple, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind to Meta's AI division, Superintelligence Labs.

“Money isn’t the only reason people come here,” he said. “The ability to start from a clean slate—not being tied to legacy systems or infrastructure—is really appealing to a lot of people.”

Meta has recently been in the spotlight for its aggressive hiring in the AI space, with some reports claiming that certain recruits have received compensation packages worth up to ₹1,600 crore (around $190 million). Zuckerberg, however, pushed back against those figures, calling many of them “inaccurate,” while acknowledging that Meta’s resources provide an advantage in the talent race.

One of the company’s major draws, according to Zuckerberg, is its investment in high-performance computing. Meta is developing some of the world’s largest AI infrastructure systems, including the Prometheus (1 gigawatt) and Hyperion (5 gigawatt) computing clusters. These, he said, will offer the highest compute power per researcher anywhere in the world.

As the AI arms race intensifies across Silicon Valley, Meta is betting that its combination of cutting-edge infrastructure and freedom to innovate will give it a competitive edge in attracting and retaining the brightest minds in the field.