#ai-talent-wars

#ai-talent-wars

Soumith Chintala, a former AI leader at Meta and one of the most influential figures in modern AI infrastructure, has joined former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's startup, Thinking Machines Lab. '[T]hinking machines...the people are incredible,' Chintala posted to his X account on Tuesday. He also updated his X bio and LinkedIn profile to indicate that he is now working at the startup, marking his first move since leaving Meta earlier this month.

On the "Unsupervised Learning" podcast, the former OpenAI VP of consumer product said that the talent wars were expanding the salary gap. "I think it does have second-order effects," Deng said. "There are some people who are not researchers who feel like they're contributing a bunch to the product or the company or bringing a ton of value, but the discrepancy in salaries and RSUs and all that is becoming wider and wider."

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg slides into your employees' DMs, how do you stop them from leaving? It's a question tech companies have wrestled with this summer as the AI talent wars reached fever pitch. And it's not just Meta on the offensive; Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are all vying for researchers and AI whizzes capable of making the next big breakthrough. In some cases, they're dangling life-changing sums of money to get them.

Amodei stated, "It's like a mixture of true belief in the mission and belief in the upside of the equity. I think Anthropic has developed a reputation for doing what it says it will do."

The AI talent wars are becoming a "transfer market" akin to sports recruiting, where individual researchers hold significant leverage during the hiring process.