Lets gut the Nerd

 https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-meta-openai-poaching.html?ueid=5a2283ab1f2706cd72d39791959718a8&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Intel%20Daily%20-%20July%202%2C%202025&utm_term=Subscription%20List%20-%20Daily%20Intelligencer%20%281%20Year%29

some of the richest companies on earth broadcasting their intention to buy dominance in a future they’re all saying is inevitable: $75 billion in data-center investment from Google in 2025; $100 billion from Amazon; $80 billion from Microsoft. Each firm has a different connection to the moment and reason to believe it might prevail. Microsoft was an early OpenAI partner. Google produced some of the core research that set things in motion. Amazon is a massive provider of cloud-computing resource

As Mark Zuckerberg staffs up Meta’s new superintelligence lab, he’s offering top research talent pay packages of up to $300 million over four years, with more than $100 million in total compensation for the first year, WIRED has learned. Meta has made at least 10 of these staggeringly high offers to OpenAI staffers.

Zuckerberg’s approach has already worked in the narrow sense that a bunch of OpenAI researchers have taken (reportedly smaller) offers, leading the company’s chief scientist to tell employees that it felt like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tried to play it cooler, telling staff, “Missionaries will beat mercenaries,” and downplaying the importance of the employees Meta managed to poach. OpenAI’s chief scientist and Altman both suggested that they’d be looking at compensation, however, which makes sense given that their core employees are being lured away with some of the highest job offers in the history of the capitalist system.

This is a different approach to buying the future, which is, for Meta, both novel and familiar. It’s familiar in that Meta, a massive firm, is mostly made up of properties it acquired for amounts that sounded high at the time — $1 billion for Instagram, $19 billion for WhatsApp — but which were, in hindsight, pretty good deals. It’s novel in that the investment here is in a few people rather than in a rapidly growing user base or a foundational technology