By now, the entire industry has heard about Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive hiring spree to bring in more engineers to his Superintelligence Labs team. A lot of the industry’s top talent was lured in by exquisite salary packages and assigned the responsibility to lead Meta to the forefront of the AI race. However, there have been a lot of desirable AI people who resisted the temptation. Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has shared insights on how some of his top talent resisted the urge for high-end paychecks.
Amodei has stated that his team has consistently refused these lucrative offers. Meta has apparently offered salary packages as high as $100 million (approximately Rs 862 crore) to lure away their talent. Anthropic’s core team, however, has resisted the temptation so far, as told by the CEO.
Anthropic AI talent refused Meta AI’s offers
Jared Kaplan, an executive at Anthropic, has shed light on the reasons behind his team’s resistance in an episode of the Lenny’s Podcast. He emphasised that the company’s mission-driven culture plays a crucial role, with employees prioritising the future of humanity over purely financial incentives. Kaplan stated that “the best-case scenario at Anthropic is that you influence the future of humanity, whereas the best-case scenario at Meta is that you make money.”
“For anybody who does get those mega offers and accepts them, I can’t say I hold it against them,” he added.
Kaplan commented further on these exceptionally high salary packages, acknowledging that “paying individuals $100 million over four years is actually relatively cheap compared to the value that is created for the business.”
Perplexity CEO weighs in
Adding to this perspective, Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said that AI companies must offer more than just financial rewards. “You’re encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you’re learning new things. And you’re getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?” he said.
With Meta’s Superintelligence Labs team, Mark Zuckerberg now hopes to put Meta at the forefront of AI, developing advanced AI models and taking the lead for the next phase of generative AI. Currently, Meta’s Llama models fall behind in overall performance and capabilities to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini models. Meta AI is available in apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
