#Meta

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has invested heavily in the metaverse, a gamble aiming to revolutionize social interaction. Despite billions

Meta is aggressively acquiring top AI talent, notably hiring Ruoming Pang, former head of Apple’s foundational models team. This strategic move, reportedly driven by a lucrative compensation package, highlights Meta’s drive to bolster its AI capabilities amidst intense industry competition. Pang’s departure may impact Apple’s AI team morale, as the company seeks to advance its AI initiatives.

Meta’s aggressive hiring is driving up tech salaries, with reports of a $20 million, four-year compensation package for an ML Engineer. Leaked filings reveal high base salaries for roles like Software Engineers and AI Researchers, often exceeding $350,000 annually. This fierce competition for specialized talent, particularly in AI, is forcing companies to offer increasingly lucrative deals, setting new benchmarks in the industry.

OpenAI has paused operations for employees this week, partly in response to Meta’s aggressive recruitment of its researchers. Leadership is actively working to retain staff and is reassessing compensation. The company is refocusing on its primary mission of achieving AGI, even as competitors like xAI push forward with new models.

Meta is acquiring a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI for nearly $15 billion, marking a significant investment in the AI space. The deal will see Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, a former MIT dropout, join Meta. Scale AI provides crucial data annotation services for training AI models and counts major tech companies among its clients. The acquisition values Scale AI at approximately $29 billion.

Meta is in advanced talks to invest over $10 billion in AI data labeling startup Scale AI. This deal, if finalized, would be a historic private financing, reflecting the importance of data in the AI landscape. Scale AI, which provides data labeling services crucial for training machine learning models, has experienced rapid growth. Meta’s investment signals a shift toward external AI partnerships and supports its strategic focus on AI, including its Llama language model and AI-powered integrations across its platforms.

Meta plans to fully automate AI-powered ad creation for brands by the end of next year, leveraging AI to generate visuals, videos, and text based on product images and budget goals. This initiative aims to further strengthen Meta’s advertising business, which accounts for over 97% of its revenue. Simultaneously, Meta is shifting towards AI for risk assessment, targeting AI to handle up to 90% of related tasks.