Mark Zuckerberg has a literal list of AI all-stars to whom he’s offering fantastic sums of money. An expert explains why he’s hiring so aggressively

The memo, obtained by CNBC and published Monday, lists top engineers and researchers hired to bolster Meta’s AI efforts. It comes months after Zuckerberg began his personal AI talent crusade—one that has blindsided competitors and sparked reports of “The List,” a compilation of the Facebook founder’s recruits he hopes will staff the Meta Superintelligence Labs. 

The document names five ex–OpenAI staff who left the company just weeks after The OpenAI Files report discussed deep leadership concerns. 

Zuckerberg has been personally reaching out to potential recruits, the Wall Street Journal reported. In his pitch to OpenAI staffers, the Meta CEO offered a $100 million signing bonus and one year’s compensation, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a recent podcast hosted by his brother, Jack.

The lucrative, pro-athlete-level job offers come after Meta’s latest AI model, Llama 4, received a cool reaction from consumers and critics. Experts say Zuckerberg’s moves might be a sign of desperation to keep up with competitors.

“Last time Meta released an AI model, it wasn’t as successful as they expected,” Edgar Perez, a corporate trainer specializing in AI and other cutting-edge technologies, told Fortune.

Zuckerberg has made good on his promise to bolster Meta’s AI efforts in recent months, hiring Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to help lead the superintelligence team he’s assembling. Perez said the next challenge for Meta is to make AI reasoning models that can contend with products like DeepSeek’s R1, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and OpenAI’s o1 series.

“At the end of the day, what Mark Zuckerberg wants to incorporate in Meta is AI agents,” Perez said. “To be able to be successful, [the AI agent] needs to reason. Let’s say, if you want to develop a task in a company, or if a customer would like to do some task through Meta, they need to decompose a number of steps. And those steps will need to be managed through a reasoning model. That’s not something that Llama, at the moment, can do, and that’s why they need to refine.”

But even with the allure of a nine-figure salary, Perez said Zuckerberg’s offer may still be hard to swallow for someone working at a place with a strong company culture.

“What happens when somebody quits [the superintelligence team]?” Perez said. “Let’s say, in a week: Will they return the bonuses? … Having that type of money, people might just decide to stay for a year or two and then leave and start their own companies later.”

Even before Zuckerberg’s memo, the Meta chief’s aggressive talent recruitment strategies have appeared to irk OpenAI’s leadership.

“I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something,” Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, wrote in an internal memo obtained and published by Wired on Saturday. “Please trust that we haven’t been sitting idly by.”

Chen told employees he was working with Altman and other leaders at the company “around the clock to talk to those with offers,” adding, “we’ve been more proactive than ever before, we’re recalibrating comp, and we’re scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent.”

Though Chen wrote he would fight to retain all of OpenAI’s talent, he “won’t do so at the price of fairness to others.”

With the announcement of a new organization within Meta, experts question if Zuckerberg’s personnel investments will turn a profit in the end, or if it will lead to more AI-generated woes. In a post on LinkedIn, Vineet Agrawal, an investor in health-tech startups, called Zuckerberg’s hiring spree “desperate.”

“When you’re winning with vision, you don’t need to win with money,” he wrote. “Real talent follows challenge and purpose. The moment someone chooses you purely for $100 million, they’ll leave you for $101 million.”