Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is planning to poach the best AI engineers and researchers based on 'The List'

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is using a list of the most talented AI engineers and researchers, known as 'The List,' to poach top talent from competitors. The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of The List.

It's Known as 'The List'—and It's a Secret File of AI Geniuses - WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/tech/meta-ai-recruiting-mark-zuckerberg-openai-018ed7fc

Mark Zuckerberg's secret list of top AI talent to poach has tech world atwitter | US news | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/mark-zuckerberg-ai-list

The people on The List are mostly in their 20s and 30s, and many of them have doctorates from prestigious universities such as the University of California, Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon University, or have experience working for major AI companies such as OpenAI or Google DeepMind.

Zuckerberg plans to bring together people from The List to create a superintelligence team of about 50 people, which will be led by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, as part of Meta's $14.8 billion investment in data labeling service Scale AI.

Meta plans to build an AI lab led by Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang specializing in the pursuit of 'superintelligence,' and offers hundreds of millions to tens of billions of yen in compensation to lure AI researchers from OpenAI and Google - GIGAZINE

To find talented engineers and scientists to hire for his superintelligence team, Zuckerberg and two Meta executives have created a group chat called a 'recruiting party,' where they've been discussing hundreds of candidates and strategies for reaching them, including whether they prefer to contact them via email, text or WhatsApp, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The talented people in the AI field have been conducting research and development in fields that have been niche up until now, so their talents have rarely been highly evaluated. However, they are important talents to secure a lead in the future AI market, so executives of major high-tech companies and leading venture capitalists are scrambling to secure talented AI researchers.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is known for focusing on AI talent. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested that Zuckerberg is offering $100 million in compensation to lure AI specialists away from competitors, but Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has called Altman's comments ' disingenuous .'

Meta has reportedly poached several key AI researchers from OpenAI to build its own inference models. CEO Altman claims that 'no talented people have left so far,' but OpenAI engineer Cheng Lu posted on X that the loss of talent is a 'huge loss.' The post has since been deleted.

Meta poached key OpenAI researchers to accelerate the development of its own inference models - GIGAZINE

It is unclear whether Meta is actually offering $100 million for the recruitment, but tech media Spyglass points out that 'it's a necessary investment given the current state of the AI market and Meta 's position.'

OpenAI, which has had several employees poached from Meta, has revealed that its Chief Research Officer, Mark Chen, said in a Slack message to employees that it felt like 'someone had broken into my house and stolen something.' It was also reported that Chen and CEO Altman are trying to counter the poaching by re-adjusting employee compensation.

In preparation for this battle for AI talent, Anthropic and OpenAI have their researchers work on separate floors with limited access, and in their workspaces, blinds are often lowered to prevent peeking. Anthropic has also invited FBI agents to its headquarters to explain the risks to employees, fearing that its researchers could become targets of foreign espionage.

Safe Superintelligence, founded by former OpenAI employee Ilya Satskivar, says that if you make it to the face-to-face interview stage, you will be required to put your mobile phone in a Faraday cage (a container that blocks communication signals).

Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Satskivar Establishes AI Company 'Safe Superintelligence' - GIGAZINE

The Wall Street Journal points out that the reason why Meta and other AI companies are investing so much money in securing talent is that 'no matter how much money you spend on building a super team of AI researchers, it's nowhere near the cost of building AI infrastructure such as data centers.' In fact, Meta plans to invest about $70 billion (about 10 trillion yen) in the AI field in 2025 alone, but companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google plan to invest even more, and the Wall Street Journal expresses this as 'humans are cheap compared to hardware.'

Professor Alexei Efros of the University of California, Berkeley said that the reason AI researchers move is not because of huge rewards, saying, 'For my students and postdocs, the goal is never to do something hot and become a millionaire. The goal is to solve cool, interesting, important, unsolved problems.' Since such research requires funding, he argues that talented people will inevitably gather at highly funded companies such as Meta, OpenAI, and Google.