🧙🏼 Zuckerberg's talent raid

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Howdy wizards,

Today marks 2 years since the first edition of this newsletter 🎈 Thanks for trusting me to be part of your inbox and for sticking with me through all my hot takes—some great, and some that aged like a banana.

I'm beyond excited to keep bringing you news, insights and experiences to help you get the most out of AI.

On that note—

Here’s what you’ll find in this edition:

• Zuckerberg hires key OpenAI staff for Meta’s superintelligence lab

• Get started vibe coding with Claude Artifacts

This calls for a double espresso and very adequate seating.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. Zuck steals key OpenAI staff

Meta follows up its aggressive push into obtaining AI dominance. Three weeks ago, they acquired Scale AI for a whooping $14B and made Alexandr Wang, Scale’s former CEO, Meta’s chief AI officer.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg continued his push to fill the Meta’s Superintelligence Lab with A-level players, hiring 8 top researchers from OpenAI armed with pay packages that mirror NBA superstar level money (up to $300 million over four years). This includes people like Trapit Bansal (co-creator of the o-series models), Shengjia Zhao (co-creator of ChatGPT and several key models) and Shuchao Bi (co-creator of GPT-4o voice mode and o4 mini).

The Chief Research Office at OpenAI described the event in an internal memo “as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something”. Sam Altman fired back that Meta’s approach is “somewhat distasteful” and that they had failed to hire the “top people and had to go quite far down their list”. He also offered reassurance to remaining employees that they’re evaluating compensation across the board.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Zuck is seemingly feeling very threatened by OpenAI and pulling moves with surgical precision to bring them down. Meta started open sourcing their models from the beginning, hoping to bring developers and consumers over to their ecosystem, but OpenAI’s first-mover advantage has remained very strong. Now, with the acquisition of a key source of data (Scale AI) and this targeted hiring coup, the chess moves are becoming more apparent.

The big question here—why are the alarm bells ringing so loud for Meta at this point? My guess is it has something to do with their apps and their related ad revenue, which relies on endless scrolling to be profitable. If you’ve used ChatGPT to research a product, you know it’s the end of scrolling. So maybe something similar is brewing in the social sphere, with AI increasingly becoming a filter for all our digital input?

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UP CLOSE

This section is about how I’m using AI from week to week, as well as practical tips & tricks I discover and actually use.

Get started vibe coding with Claude Artifacts

Vibe coding is all the rage at this moment in time. Anyone can turn their ideas into functioning apps in a relatively short amount of time with AI.

With practice, most people can build quite functional software tools now. The development process of vibe coding with AI will eventually get even easier, but starting to embrace this evolution now is a great idea, regardless of your job description—if for no other purpose than understanding what’s possible. I think spinning up tools from our imagination will become part of most white-collar jobs eventually, and as an early adopter you can recognise opportunities early.

I’ve compiled some resources that I’ll give you over the next couple of weeks so you can get good at vibe coding whether you’re just starting out or you’re already more advanced.

This week….

Vibe coding for absolute beginners with Claude Artifacts

Claude Artifacts can be considered a gateway drug to making “real” apps with AI. It’s as simple as having a conversation with Claude and telling it what you want to create. You only need an idea and the ability to articulate it – Claude handles everything else in the background (coding, design, debugging, hosting, deployment ++).

There’s now even a new feature where you can make these Artifacts AI-powered now by using the Claude API. A simple example, let’s say you want to build a game with a virtual cat, and you want the cat to be AI-powered so it can chat naturally with the user; you can plug in AI through this feature.

To get started creating Artifacts, just head over to Claude’s dedicated space from where you can browse or customise artifacts created by others, or build your own app from scratch:

Try creating a game or a little tool for yourself that would make some aspect of your life easier.

Still confused? Watch Anthropic’s 1-minute demo on how to create an artifact.

After you've built a few Artifacts, you'll experience both the magic and the frustration of vibe coding. The magic: you can create functional apps just by describing them. The frustration: you'll quickly bump into walls. Your creations are inherently limited—they're locked in Claude's sandbox, you can't fetch live data, make external API calls, etc. Good for demos, but not production.

That’s your sign to upgrade to a more powerful tool.

Next week, I’ll dive into some tools that will level up the way you vibe code. I’m talking Lovable, Replit, Cursor and more. And which one you should use.

Stay tuned.

THAT’S ALL FOR THIS WEEK

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