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Last month, reports surfaced of some mind-boggling job offers in the tech industry, where the employment situation is otherwise grim. AI researchers were being lured with packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The New York Timescompared the industry’s hiring practices to the NBA, noting that “recruiting A.I. free agents has become a spectacle on social media, much like the period before a trade deadline in sports.”
In the weeks since, revelations have confirmed what the initial stories only implied and helped clarify the reasons: While the market for star AI engineers is extremely hot, the truly exceptional offers are only coming from one company: Meta. Other firms are fighting to retain their AI talent, of course, but none are matching Mark Zuckerberg’s nine-figure bids, and some are refusing to make counteroffers at all. Why?
Among the constellation of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, and Meta), mature start-ups (OpenAI and Anthropic), product-less new ventures (Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab), application companies (Cursor, Replit), and, uh, “other” firms (xAI) that are competing over the relatively small pool of people with expertise and experience in cutting-edge AI development, Meta is a strange reputational outlier: a company with high ambitions and near-infinite resources that apparently needs to outbid its competition by multiples.
The surface-level story isn’t especially mysterious. Of the big tech companies, Meta is in some obvious ways further from the action, as its swing to AI, despite the presence of serious talent at the time, was late — in part because the company had just pivoted to the “metaverse.” Unlike Google, where much of the research that set the recent AI boom in motion was done, or OpenAI, which was the first to turn modern LLMs into a product, Meta has clearly been in chase mode. Most of all, its models aren’t competitive.
It also hasn’t helped that Zuckerberg’s recent, Altman-esque attempts at AI prophesying are even less convincing from within the industry than from outside it, and to the extent he has tried to articulate a vision — replacing friends with AI, a vaguely defined “superintelligence” that will somehow mainly benefit individuals — it comes across as borrowed and incoherent even by the low standards of CEO AI prognostication. And whatever motives you might ascribe to the leaders of AI firms, the talent they’re pursuing tends to be — by a few definitions of the word — somewhat idealistic. If they’re worried about AI risk, they’re probably more inclined to work for someone like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei than Mark Zuckerberg circa 2025. If they’re interested in pure research, they’re probably going to want to work for people they see as fellow pure researchers — people like Google’s Demis Hassabis or a founder like Ilya Sutskever. If they’re a bit more accelerationist and spend a lot of time absorbing the sort of AI discourse that’s popular on X — or if they’re just looking at where concentrations of like-minded talent already exist — they might be more inclined to work at OpenAI. Gruesome as parts of it may be, even xAI has a coherent pitch to a certain sort of “cracked” AI engineer: lots of resources, few guardrails, proximity to Elon Musk, and a corresponding ideological mission. Perhaps most importantly, setting aside various specific motivations and theories of what the AI arms race really is, you won’t find a lot of people in the industry who would bet on Meta winning it, at least right now. (Though one could argue that the company’s entertainment-centric, slop-and-advertising-adjacent approach to actually monetizing AI so far represents a realistic if disheartening path toward extracting value from LLMs.)
That Mark Zuckerberg has a weaker future-of-AI pitch than the MechaHitler guy goes a long way toward explaining his company’s outlier offers (recent stories about internal materials allowing “sensual” chats with kids certainly can’t help). But elements of Meta’s reputation that are less visible outside of the tech industry are playing a major role as well. At Forbes, Rashi Shrivastava and Richard Nieva describe deeper problems, reporting on constant internal restructurings (the fourth in six months is underway, according to the Information), unclear priorities, and bruising demands to work on products that, so far, have been poorly received. While punishing “9-9-6”–style work schedules are becoming more common at AI firms, employees are often motivated by genuine enthusiasm, fear of their companies losing a high-stakes race, and, of course, lots of equity tied to their work’s success. Since 2023, Meta’s general orientation toward its employees has become much harsher, with layoffs and public warnings from leadership sharply diverging from the company’s financial performance. A widely circulated internal memo from a (now former) AI researcher at Meta warned that a “metastatic cancer” was threatening the company’s work culture. Last week, in a post meant to push back against “sensationalist” reporting on the memo, he described his intention to draw attention to the “unhealthy” traits of the AI organization and wasn’t actually much gentler:
• The fear that people feel on a daily basis of reviews and getting fired, commenting on a lack of safeness people felt, which is crucial for morale.
• The necessity of a culture and processes that enable ‘big projects’ to come to fruition.
• The management culture not promoting a sense of camaraderie among employees, leading to a lack of sense of belonging.
• Instability in team assignments, leading to experience not building up and crystallizing over time.
• A wavering vision that was tough for team members to enthusiastically rally behind.
For a company that was for years regarded by those in the industry as a pretty good place to work, with generous benefits, good compensation, and if not a great culture then at least a productive one, this is fairly damning stuff. It suggests, among other things, that the bill for Meta’s constant attempts at reinvention might be coming due, and that management’s attempts to discipline its workforce may have had unforeseen costs. It’s a bearish signal for Meta’s AI efforts and tells a slightly different story than the company’s wave of mega-offers first implied: Billion-dollar bids aren’t the new norm for top AI hires. In the talent war, they just happen to be Meta’s only weapon.