Meta’s CEO is trying to buy his way to the front of the AI race, poaching top talent and eyeing startups. But can money replace innovation?
Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite move? Copy, poach, repeat. It made him one of the richest people on the planet. Now, he’s dusting off that playbook for his biggest challenge yet: the AI race.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is on a hiring and buying spree, throwing eye-watering sums at top AI researchers and startups in a last-ditch effort to catch up to OpenAI, Google, and upstart rivals like DeepSeek. It’s a full-court press to convince the tech world and investors that Meta still matters in the AI race.
But here’s the twist: Zuckerberg is raiding everyone else’s.THE MOVES
In the past few weeks, Zuckerberg AI team has:
So far, Meta has nabbed several big names: Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Xiaohua Zhai (formerly OpenAI), and others like Trapit Bansal and Jack Rae, who left Google DeepMind. The company also reportedly tried (and failed) to lure high-profile AI researchers like OpenAI’s Noam Brown and Google’s Koray Kavukcuoglu.
The unit’s mission? To build AI systems smarter than humans. Yes, really.
This is Zuckerberg’s version of the Thanos snap: collect the stones, snap his fingers, and will himself to the front of the AI line.Throwing Money at the Future
Zuckerberg is also throwing cash at startups. Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI and is in talks to acquire PlayAI, which develops eerily human-sounding voice agents. There were also feelers sent to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence and Mira Murati’s new lab Thinking Machines.
If it feels like Zuckerberg is panic-buying his way through the AI mall before the shelves are empty, that’s because he kind of is.
