Zuckerberg's 'List' Has Silicon Valley Buzzing

In Silicon Valley, it's known as "The List," reports the Wall Street Journal. Compiled by Mark Zuckerberg over the last several months, this list includes the names of the leading engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence—and Zuckerberg is reportedly trying to recruit them all. The story says Zuckerberg has been offering $100 million salaries to get people to jump to a new lab at Meta focused on superintelligence.

• "The recruits on 'The List' typically have Ph.D.s from elite schools like Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon," reads the story. "They have experience at places like OpenAI in San Francisco and Google DeepMind in London. They are usually in their 20s and 30s—and they all know each other. They spend their days staring at screens to solve the kinds of inscrutable problems that require spectacular amounts of computing power."

Zuckerberg's supersized AI ambitions have been called "crazy" by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, notes the Guardian. "I'm really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that," he told the Uncapped podcast hosted by his brother Jack. "I think the strategy of a ton of upfront, guaranteed comp, and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they're focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don't think that's going to set up a great culture."