There’s been a lot of buzz around AI recently. Sure, it hasn’t proven particularly useful, nor can it be trusted — but you can generate an image of Mario riding Eragon! Isn’t that worth several billion dollars?

As this is the new “thing” right now in the Valley, companies are pouring all of their time and resources into it. Left behind in this whole thing, it seems, is Meta, which finds itself playing catch-up to other major players like Google and OpenAI.

This isn’t for lack of trying, however. In a recent interview, OpenAI’s Mark Chen said that Meta attempted to recruit several of their programmers with hefty pay packages and, uh, soup.

Yeah. According to Chen, Zuckerberg made some soup by hand, then personally delivered it to people whom he wanted to hire. The success rate, it seems, was low — though he did not comment on the quality of the soup.

OpenAI’s Mark Chen:
- “Meta went after half of my direct reports and they all declined.”
- “Meta has $10 billion of capital per year to deploy towards talent.”
- “Zuck hand-cooked and hand-delivered soup to people he was trying to hire from OpenAI.”

Insane AI talent war. pic.twitter.com/l2Mi6HjXsF

— Yuchen Jin (@Yuchenj_UW) December 2, 2025