is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
Month after month, message after message, the AI engineer was hearing from Meta recruiters. The recruiters were pestering him to leave his employer and switch over to support the company’s AI efforts, and they were offering a sizable salary package to do so. But he wasn’t so sure.
The engineer, who works for a startup that was acquired by a leading AI company and requested anonymity from The Verge, said he had heard from friends that the company expected a lot of personal sacrifices in exchange for its high salaries, whether on employees’ value systems when it comes to Al or work-life balance. Engineers there, he heard, were working around the clock to catch up with rival companies like OpenAl, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft.
With so many firms desperately scrambling for AI talent, Meta was offering between $1–1.4 million in total annual compensation (which is typically measured as a combination of salary, annual bonus, and amortized stock value) for many AI roles. But, he suspected, its offers might be less generous than they sounded — tied heavily to subjective performance metrics that could be weaponized against employees. And just as importantly, he wasn’t willing to give up a semblance of work-life balance and a healthy work environment to make a few hundred thousand dollars more. He didn’t pursue the opportunity.
In recent months, Meta has launched on an AI hiring spree after making its largest-ever external investment: a $14.3 billion acquisition of a 49 percent stake in Scale AI, an industry giant that provides training data to fuel the technology of companies like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. As part of the deal, Meta spun up a brand-new superintelligence lab led by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang — and to staff the lab, it started poaching.
Meta has reportedly poached as many as 10 of OpenAI’s top researchers and model developers, with some pay packages reportedly adding up to $300 million over four years, including equity. (Meta disputes this figure.) It’s also approached a slew of other top AI talent across the industry. Ruoming Pang, who heads up Apple’s foundation AI models team, reportedly departed for Meta, and at least two Anthropic employees and two DeepMind employees have reportedly joined the team as well. The goal is to secure Meta’s spot in the race to achieve artificial general intelligence, or AGI: a hypothetical AI system that equals or surpasses human cognitive abilities, and the moving target that almost every AI company is currently chasing at breakneck speed. Meta’s primary weapon is vast amounts of money. But some sources across the AI industry question whether that will be enough.
Meta, to date, has not been the most exciting destination for budding AI engineers
Meta, to date, has not been the most exciting destination for budding AI engineers. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to make up for lost ground in the AI race, having spent years and significant resources over-indexing on the metaverse while competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon invested billions in AI startups and signed cloud contracts and other deals. The company’s Llama AI models often rank low on publicly maintained performance leaderboards; at time of writing, Meta’s first appearance on one such leaderboard, Chatbot Arena, was at No. 30. In May, it reportedly delayed the launch of its new flagship AI model as developers struggled to deliver performance upgrades, and executives have been public on earnings calls about the need to aggressively invest and shore up against competition. The Scale AI deal, and Meta’s subsequent sky-high budget for hiring AI talent, is Zuckerberg’s Hail Mary: paying a premium for some of the brightest minds in the AI world to safeguard Meta’s future.
But although Meta is plying AI workers with staggering salaries, a mountain of money can’t buy everyone. Anthropic and DeepMind have reportedly had far fewer defections to Meta than OpenAI has, and that’s been an ongoing trend. The reason, to those inside the field, is obvious: the AI world is filled with true believers, and even the biggest companies need more than a cash offer to get many of them on their side.
Industry insiders emphasized to The Verge that in a sector where almost any company will offer job security and a good salary, experienced AI engineers and researchers want to work somewhere that aligns with their values, whether their top priority is AI safety and the risks the tech poses for humanity’s future, the ethical considerations of AI’s impact on society today, or accelerating and advancing the tech quicker than anyone else. Some engineers, researchers, or scientists the company has approached have turned down Meta’s advances, industry sources tell The Verge.
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