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Even in the money-soaked world of AI, the hiring efforts of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg stood out this year as he enticed top machine learning researchers with payments reportedly reaching up to $1 billion to defect from their employers and come work for him instead.
The overtures weren’t always successful; in one embarrassing case, an individual was offered 10-figures to work at Meta’s so-called Superintelligence initiative — but turned it down to stay at Thinking Machines Lab, a venture started by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati.
And now, amid reporting that Zuckerberg’s micromanaging already has the company’s AI efforts crumbling into internal chaos, it sounds like the Facebook parent company is already bleeding some of the talent that Zuckerberg paid top dollar to acquire.
As Wired reports, at least three staffers have already punched out for good. Gone are Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, both poached from OpenAI — and both of whom are now headed back there after a taste of Zuckerberg’s management style, according to the magazine. Also departing is Rishabh Agarwal, who joined a few months ago, as well as Chaya Nayak, a longtime product manager at Meta who’s also jumping ship to OpenAI.
For their part, the researchers are either declining to comment or keeping their reasons for departing pointedly vague.
“It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density,” Agarwal wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”
He also took the opportunity to turn Zuckerberg’s words against him, adding that “I ultimately choose to follow Mark’s own advice: ‘In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.'”
Speaking to Wired, a Meta spokesperson tried to rationalize the departures.
“During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one,” they told the magazine. “That’s normal.”
That’s not entirely wrong. In the red-hot AI race, researchers do tend to jump between employers at a rapid pace, both to secure more money, but also at times to make what they frame as ethical decisions about which tech companies are trying to build responsible products.
OpenAI, for instance, has hemorrhaged employees who went on to start Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence, Perplexity, xAI, Eureka Labs, the aforementioned Thinking Machines, and more.
So weep not, Mark — at least you’re in good company.
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