From the Wall Street Journal, August 1:
The loyalties and larger-than-life figures prompting some people to turn down insanely lucrative offers in Silicon Valley right now
As Mark Zuckerberg sought to play catch-up in the generative AI race, he reached out a few months ago to OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, and offered to buy her fledgling startup, Thinking Machines Lab.
When she said no, the Meta chief executive responded by launching a full-scale raid. In the following weeks he approached more than a dozen of Murati’s roughly 50 employees to sound them out about jumping ship. His chief target: Andrew Tulloch, a leading researcher and co-founder at the startup.
To peel him off, Zuckerberg dangled a billion-dollar package that could, with top bonuses and extraordinary stock performance, have been worth as much as $1.5 billion over at least six years, according to people familiar with the matter.
Tulloch said no. None of his colleagues left either.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the description of the offer “inaccurate and ridiculous” and said that the size of any compensation package is predicated on a stock rising. He added that Meta is not interested in acquiring Thinking Machines.
Even in Silicon Valley, where star engineers have long wielded outsize economic power, turning down nine-figure pay packages is rare. But as the battle royal for AI talent escalates, the companies with the biggest war chests are finding the cash cannon only gets them so far.
While some AI researchers act like free agents, bouncing between labs in pursuit of more pay and power, quite a few display an unwavering allegiance to their chosen leaders, larger-than-life figures who, in the tech industry, carry the single-name cachet of rock stars. The idiosyncratic cultures of the different startups bind employees to one another. Meanwhile, after years of poaching en ronde, the companies involved are getting savvier about playing defense.
OpenAI and startups launched by its alumni like Murati are the frequent targets of Zuckerberg’s recruiting blitz. From the earliest days of the AI race, pioneers lured researchers with the promise of getting to work for the historic mission of creating artificial general intelligence, or a system that is smarter than a human at most tasks. It was OpenAI, whose co-founders include Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Ilya Sutskever, that turned that mission into a quasi-religious quest, with its nonprofit charter to ensure that the work benefits humanity.
Meta has reached out to more than 100 of OpenAI’s employees. It has hired at least 10. On July 25, Zuckerberg picked Shengjia Zhao, a Chinese researcher who spent three years at OpenAI, to lead Meta’s new superintelligence team.
The OpenAI researchers who have so far rebuffed Meta’s advances chose to remain because they believed OpenAI was the closest to reaching artificial general intelligence, wanted to work at a smaller company and were wary of having the fruits of their labors go toward a product that was primarily driven by advertising, according to people familiar with the matter.
Zuckerberg has recruited even fewer researchers from Anthropic, the $170 billion startup led by Dario Amodei, who took some of OpenAI’s top talent with him when he left five years ago to start it.
All of Anthropic’s seven co-founders are still at the company. Many of them met Amodei through the tightknit world of effective altruism over a decade ago, a social movement that grew popular among researchers for its early concerns that AI could go rogue and destroy humanity. Some of them lived in a group house in San Francisco, debating the most effective way to give away their wealth and the risk that AI posed.
Zuckerberg has hired at least two employees from the startup—Joel Pobar and Anton Bakhtin—both of whom previously spent multiple years working at Meta.
Sutskever has built the startup he co-founded last year, Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, in a way that makes it relatively poach-proof. Unlike Amodei, Sutskever didn’t pick off a large group of OpenAI researchers to join him.
Most of Sutskever’s staffers aren’t well-known in Silicon Valley, in part because the company is looking for promising technologists with new ideas whom Sutskever can mentor. They are discouraged from mentioning SSI on their LinkedIn profiles, in part to prevent other companies from trying to snatch them away. Earlier this year, Sutskever rebuffed an offer from Zuckerberg to buy SSI.
Murati, who spent six years at OpenAI before leaving last September, has her own band of apostles. Originally from Albania, she joined OpenAI when it was a small research lab, helped launch its first product and came to run almost every aspect of the company as CTO.
At OpenAI, she was known for her emotional intelligence and lack of ego, which earned her the loyalty of the research and engineering staff. At Thinking Machines, she has instituted a similarly egoless reporting hierarchy as OpenAI and SSI, where even senior researchers are listed as a “Member of Technical Staff” in a nod to the flat, collegial culture of Bell Labs, one of the inspirations behind OpenAI....
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HT: Techie + Gamers who brought us the story immediately below: "AI Data Centers in Texas Used 463 Million Gallons of Water, Residents Told to Take Shorter Showers"
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