Al Talent War Is Starting to Look Like a Sports Draft

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering $100 million+ offers to top AI researchers and engineers and for good reason. Meta is trailing in the AI race, and after the launch of Llama 4, Zuck knows he needs to catch up fast.

$100M might sound like a lot, until you consider Meta’s ~$2T market cap. Spending a few billion to improve even slightly the odds (to 5% from less than 1% right now) of becoming a top 3 AI company seems obvious. The upside is potentially worth trillions.

Think of it like sports. In the NBA, LeBron James is offered $50 million a year. The Lakers? Valued at $10 billion. LeBron can single-handedly win championships. That’s what elite AI researchers are today : game changers. A single breakthrough can put a company ahead for months, even years, and massively pull market share.

For years, game defining tech talent’s comp. has been capped and they are arguably underpaid. AI talent wars changes that. We’re entering a world where bidding wars for top engineers will start to look more like sports bidding, and rightfully so. For others, well, we’ll all be unemployed anyway.