Silicon Valley’s most absurd recruitment tactic yet has arrived. As reported by Fortune, Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, revealed that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has personally shown up at researchers’ homes with hand-cooked soup in an effort to lure them away from OpenAI. What began as a battle over compute budgets and signing bonuses has now turned into literal home delivery.
Chen said Meta has aggressively pursued half of his direct reports, backed by billions for hiring, but the soup delivery was what shocked him. It was not symbolic. It was real soup that Zuckerberg made himself, delivered directly to researchers he hoped to recruit.
In response, Chen has leaned into food diplomacy too. He confessed that he now delivers soup as part of his own recruiting strategy but refuses to cook it. Instead, he brings high-end Korean soup from Michelin-level restaurant Daeho. He even said he is considering a team cooking class for an off-site recruitment event.
The reason anyone is bringing food to doorsteps is simple. The number of engineers who can genuinely push the frontier of large language models is incredibly small. Industry insiders estimate the global pool at fewer than one thousand people. These are the minds that understand scaling laws, training stability, multimodal grounding, data pipelines, and the infrastructure behind trillion-parameter systems.
In past eras, top talent was courted with sushi bars, luxury cafeterias, private shuttles, and gym memberships. A few years ago, compensation packages reportedly reached one hundred million dollars for individuals. But when money stops moving people, CEOs look for something personal. A hand-delivered meal from a chief executive sends a message that no recruiter or HR package can deliver. It says you matter at the highest level.
And yet Chen insists that despite Meta’s effort, most of those approached stayed. He said people are not simply choosing salary. They are staying because they believe OpenAI is closer to delivering artificial general intelligence. According to Chen, even candidates holding Meta offers said they doubt Meta will get there first.
The soup wars may sound ridiculous, but they reveal something deeper. Silicon Valley is now competing through intimacy because transactional incentives have maxed out. When a CEO shows up at your door, it becomes harder to ignore what is being offered. And when the race is for minds capable of shaping the future of machine intelligence, a bowl of soup is not just soup. It is strategy.
