Here is your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, August 18th. Today on Forbes, Zuckerberg squandered his

AI talent. Now he's spending billions to replace it. Metta was teeming with top AI talent until it

wasn't. Years before Mark Zuckerberg's high-profile shopping spree, the company employed the researchers

and engineers that would ultimately depart to start major AI companies. Founders of perplexity,

mistrawl, Fireworks AI, and World Labs all hailed from the Facebook Parents AI Lab. And as the

AI boom has spurred the build of ever more capable models, others have decamped

to rivals like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The brain drain of the last few years has been tough.

Three former meta-AI employees told Forbes. One ex-Meta-AI employee said, quote, they already had the best people and lost them to open AI.

This is Mark trying to undo the loss of talent.

And now, even as Zuckerberg makes jaw-dropping offers for top-tier AI researchers,

the social media giant continues to lose those that are left.

Today, when it comes to recruiting high-caliber AI researchers, meta is the social media giant continues to lose those that are left.

Today, when it comes to recruiting high-caliber AI researchers, META is often an afterthought.

Insiders at some of Silicon Valley's biggest AI companies said that prior to the fresh hiring of the last few months, META's talent largely didn't meet their hiring bar.

A senior executive at one of the major frontier AI companies told Forbes, quote,

We might be interested in hiring some of the new people Mark is hiring now, but it's been

a while since we were particularly interested in the people who were already there.

Google has hired less than two dozen AI employees from Meta since last fall,

according to a person familiar with Google's hiring,

compared to the hundreds of AI researchers and engineers it hired in that time frame overall.

That person told Forbes that, quote, prevailing belief is that meta didn't have much talent

left to poach from.

...