Winning in AI requires massive investments, setting up datacenters, and as it turns out, some culinary skills as well.
OpenAI’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen has said that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was personally delivering hand-cooked soup to OpenAI researchers to try and poach them. Meta had spent billions of dollars trying to build an elite research team, and it seems that Zuckerberg was looking to sweeten the deal with some soup.
“They’ve gone after a lot of people, quite unsuccessfully,” Chen said on the Core Memory podcast. “Just to give you context, within my staff, within my direct reports, before they hired anyone from OpenAI, I think they went after half of my direct reports — and they all declined.”
Chen acknowledged that Meta’s vast financial resources—estimated at around $10 billion of capital per year to deploy towards talent—meant they would inevitably succeed in recruiting some employees. “Of course, if they have something like $10 billion of capital per year to deploy towards talent, they’re gonna get someone,” he noted.
Despite Meta’s financial firepower, Chen expressed satisfaction with OpenAI’s ability to retain its key personnel. “I actually feel like we’ve been fairly good about protecting our top talent and it’s been kind of interesting and fun to see it escalate over time,” he said.
The soup incident particularly stood out to Chen as emblematic of how intense the competition had become. “Some interesting stories here are Zuck actually went and hand delivered soup to people that he was trying to recruit from us. I think he hand cooked the soup and it was shocking to me at the time, but over time I’ve kind of updated towards these things can be effective in their own way.”
The revelation underscores the brutal competition for AI talent as tech giants race to dominate the artificial intelligence landscape. Chen had earlier told employees that some of Meta’s successful poaching attempts felt like “someone having broken into their house and stolen something”. Meta has been investing heavily in AI research and development, particularly after falling behind in the generative AI race after the failure of Llama 4. Meanwhile, the broader industry has seen unprecedented talent movements, with researchers commanding multi-million dollar compensation packages and companies deploying increasingly creative recruitment strategies. From massive stock grants to promises of cutting-edge research freedom, the war for AI expertise has transformed into one of the most expensive talent battles in tech history—with apparently even personal delivery gestures from billionaire CEOs thrown into the mix.