They aren’t NBA stars, Grammy-winning musicians, or crypto bros. They are a new class of nine-figure earners: AI researchers in their 20s and 30s, recruited straight out of elite Ph.D. programmes to shape the future of artificial intelligence. In Silicon Valley, they’re known simply as “The List.”Compiled by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, The List is a secret roster of the world’s top AI engineers and scientists. It’s Zuckerberg’s moonshot attempt to poach the brightest minds from OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and elite universities. As the Wall Street Journal reported, these are the people for whom he is dangling $100 million-plus packages to join Meta’s new superintelligence lab.
The AI Free Agency Era
Until recently, many of these researchers were happy pursuing academic careers. But as AI transforms from theoretical science to trillion-dollar industry, companies have realised these quiet geniuses are the new LeBron James. Their work is arcane – involving probability theory, linear algebra, and esoteric neural architectures – but their value is skyrocketing.“They are being treated like NBA free agents,” wrote WSJ reporters Ben Cohen, Berber Jin, and Meghan Bobrowsky.
Who Are They?
Lucas Beyer, for instance, works in multimodal vision-language research. As a boy in Belgium, he dreamed of making video games. He studied mechanical engineering in Germany before pivoting to AI, eventually interning at Google. Rejected the first time he applied, he pursued a Ph.D. and returned with offers from every top lab except Meta. Now, after stints at Google Brain, DeepMind, and OpenAI Zurich, he has finally been recruited directly by Zuckerberg himself.Then there is Yu Zhang, an automatic speech recognition researcher whose field was once dismissed as “dead.” During his first internship, a mentor advised him to quit speech research, suggesting ads at Yahoo instead. Months later, deep learning revived speech recognition, and today Zhang’s work is indispensable to companies like OpenAI, with Meta trying to lure him to its team.And Misha Bilenko, who describes his hobby as “applying hill-climbing search and gradient descent algorithms to real-world domains,” is among the rare engineers whose specialised knowledge in large-scale machine learning is coveted by every major AI lab.
Perfect Timing, Perfect Skills
Most recruits on The List have Ph.D.s from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, or Carnegie Mellon – programmes with acceptance rates under 1%. Many began their research journeys a decade ago, long before AI became sexy. They studied generative models, robotics, and speech processing when these were obscure subfields. Today, they are the cornerstones of LLMs, text-to-video systems, and autonomous AI.The AI arms race has made them instant celebrities in the tight-knit research community. As one executive put it, they possess “tribal knowledge” – expertise passed through papers, lab discussions, and collaborative hacks that is nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere.
Why Nine Figures?
Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are willing to pay these astronomical salaries not only because of their scarcity but also because humans, despite such price tags, remain cheaper than infrastructure. In 2025 alone, Meta plans to spend $70 billion on AI compute and data centres. Hiring a handful of $100-million researchers is, comparatively, a bargain.Zuckerberg has been personally messaging them, reading their technical papers, and inviting them to his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe. He even created a group chat titled “Recruiting Party” with two Meta executives to discuss potential hires and how best to contact them – email, text, or WhatsApp.But it’s not just Meta rolling out the red carpet. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hosts poker nights at his Russian Hill mansion in San Francisco to woo talent. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s President, used to organise “Game of Thrones” watch parties. Even Elon Musk threw parties at OpenAI’s headquarters to pitch his vision for xAI. Google, meanwhile, deploys Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin themselves to charm top recruits.
Alexandr Wang: The Billionaire Recruiter
One of Zuckerberg’s priciest recent hires is Alexandr Wang, 28, CEO of Scale AI. The son of Chinese physicists at Los Alamos, Wang started a Google Doc of startup ideas in ninth grade. This month, Meta spent $14 billion for a stake in his company and to bring him onboard its superintelligence project, a move Zuckerberg sees as critical to Meta’s AI turnaround after its recent Llama 4 model fell flat.
The Secretive World of AI Labs
In these AI labs, secrecy is paramount. At Anthropic and OpenAI, researchers work on access-restricted floors with blinds drawn to block visual leaks. Safe Superintelligence interviews are conducted without phones, placed in Faraday cages to block signals. The FBI even briefed Anthropic employees on potential foreign espionage threats.Yet beneath this cloak of secrecy lies a tight social fabric. These researchers compare notes about offers, coordinate moves, and sometimes negotiate as package deals. When Bill Peebles, an AI Ph.D. student at Berkeley, thanked fellow student Tim Brooks in his 2023 dissertation, neither knew they would soon build OpenAI’s groundbreaking Sora text-to-video generator together. Today, Brooks has moved to DeepMind, while Peebles remains at OpenAI despite Meta’s attempts to poach him.
The Rise of AI’s Secret List
The List is not public. Its members do not seek fame. But they are shaping the technologies that will define the 21st century – from general-purpose AI to superintelligence. They are the geniuses commanding nine figures, recruited out of college to build the future.Because in the AI arms race, power belongs to those who can turn code into cognition – and cognition into capital.
