Latest news with #Amodei
Mint
4 days ago
- Business
- Mint
Anthropic's quiet edge in the AI talent war
The war for top AI talent is hitting frenzied new heights among giants like Meta and OpenAI. But it's turning out that Anthropic, maker of the popular Claude models, is the place many engineers would rather work. New research from venture firm SignalFire shows that the startup is increasing its engineering organization faster than those competitors and more. The $170 billion AI company is hiring engineers 2.68 times faster than it's losing them. That number is 2.18 for OpenAI, 2.07 for Meta and 1.17 for Google. To be sure, we shouldn't expect established players like Meta and Google to grow as fast as the young upstarts, SignalFire said, but Anthropic's retention advantage does stand out, especially in Silicon Valley, where recruitment efforts have hit a new peak. Meta's drive this summer to staff its 'Superintelligence Labs" unit sparked the most recent round of talent raids with Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg often making personal offers to top tier AI talent at places like at OpenAI as well as Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Apple. Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei said he won't match salaries for sky-high offers that come in from Meta, saying to do so would be unfair to the equally talented engineers who weren't targeted. Amodei made the comments on an episode of the Big Technology Podcast that aired last week. And yet, employees are still staying, he said. So far, 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. But Amodei said he talked to some employees who turned down Meta's offers, saying they 'wouldn't even talk to Mark Zuckerberg." He added, 'What they are doing is trying to buy something that cannot be bought. And that is alignment with the mission." Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees who wanted to build AI with a greater emphasis on safety and using the technology for good. That unique mission and culture has been a huge draw for AI job seekers, according to Heather Doshay, a partner at SignalFire. While most AI companies pour huge investments into guardrails, Anthropic is uniquely outspoken about it, she said. 'I talk to a lot of candidates in the market in my job. And if I ask any candidate, what is the dream company you have at this point? Anthropic is named more often than anyone else," Doshay said. Anthropic said it credits its commitment to safety, the quality of its research and its team of top researchers as reasons that talent chooses to go there. In many ways, OpenAI still has an advantage when it comes to public awareness. (ChatGPT is to AI as Kleenex is to tissues, Doshay said.) But the coding capabilities of Anthropic's Claude models have long been extremely popular among the developer community—the group that makes up this talent market. Michael Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science and Director of the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, said there are many factors that play into any candidate's decision on which offer to accept. Salary is a major one, but if there's not a huge order of magnitude of difference in compensation packages, mission and culture become bigger considerations. So do the recent technology advancements of a given company. To some degree, Shamos said, 'I think it's cyclic. If Claude is the hottest LLM right now, then people want to work for Anthropic. When GPT-5 comes out, it's going to be OpenAI again." Nor should the bigger players be discounted, he said. A Google spokesperson said its attrition rates remain very low, and it is attracting leading AI talent, including researchers and engineers who come from top rival labs. Meta and OpenAI didn't comment. SignalFire's Doshay said, 'Obviously there are going to be, you know, many more miles in this marathon to come. And so it's anyone's game."
Business Insider
4 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Dario Amodei says Anthropic hasn't been hit as hard as rivals in the AI talent wars — and it boils down to 2 things
Meta needs to work harder if it wants to make Anthropic sweat the AI talent wars — at least, that's what CEO Dario Amodei is saying. Amodei said that Anthropic is generally faring better than the competition amid Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's efforts to poach top talent from rivals, with reported pay packages as high as $100 million. "You can see publicly the list of people who went to the Meta Superintelligence Lab," Amodei recently told Stripe cofounder John Collison on Collison's "Cheeky Pint" podcast. "Even if you normalize for our size," he said, "many turned them down." "I think relative to other companies, we've done well. We may even have been relatively advantaged," the Anthropic CEO added. Amodei said that his employees are largely choosing to stay due to a mixture of loyalty and the potential financial upside. "It's like a mixture of true belief in the mission and belief in the upside of the equity," Amodei said. "I think Anthropic has developed a reputation for doing what it says it will do, in some cases making less promises, but keeping those promises that we make." Anthropic hasn't emerged unscathed from the AI talent wars. Meta successfully hired away at least one high-profile Anthropic employee, Joel Pobar, who worked on inference and previously spent 11 years at Meta. Zuckerberg also poached Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, and hired Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, to lead Meta's SuperIntelligence group. Amodei recently said that some of his employees "wouldn't even talk to Mark Zuckerberg." Some recent hiring and retention data sheds more insight into Anthropic's evolving head count. Venture firm SignalFire found that Anthropic is hiring engineers around 2.68 times as fast as it is losing them, The Wall Street Journal reported, with a higher rate of hiring new engineers than losing them compared to OpenAI, Meta, and Google. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees, including Amodei, who shared the belief that AI had the potential for both ill and good. In 2023, the company published a 22-page document focused on growing AI responsibly. Amodei has been outspoken about the need for society to prepare for what he predicts will be massive white collar job losses in the near future as a result of AI advances — a view that other CEOs, including OpenAI's Sam Altman and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, have pushed back on. Anthropic is often viewed as an AI safety-focused company, but its leader sees its mission as broader. "I more want Anthropic to be a company where everyone is thinking about the public purpose, rather than a one-issue company that's focused on AI safety or the misalignment of AI systems," Amodei told Time in 2024. "Internally, I think we've succeeded at that, where we have people with a bunch of different perspectives, but what they share is a real commitment to the public purpose."
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Paul Graham's guide to how you can save your job from AI
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham says AI is not coming for every job, just the boring ones. AI is "good at scutwork," and low-level programming jobs are "already disappearing," Graham said. Graham said the best way to save your job is to do it better than AI can. "It may be a mistake to ask which occupations are most safe from being taken by AI," Graham wrote in an X post on Tuesday. "What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It's good at scutwork. So that's the thing to avoid," he continued. Graham said programming jobs "at the bottom end" are not safe from AI, adding that "those jobs are already disappearing." Top programmers "who are good enough to start their own companies," on the other hand, can still command top salaries, he wrote. "So I think the best general advice for protecting oneself from AI is to do something so well that you're operating way above the level of scutwork," Graham said. Representatives for Graham at Y Combinator did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Graham said that to become a superstar in your chosen field, you've got to have passion. "It's hard to do something really well if you're not deeply interested in it," he added. Graham isn't the only one who has acknowledged AI's disruptive potential on the job market. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan in a January interview that he expects AI to be able to write code like a midlevel engineer within this year. Then, in May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in an interview that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs in the next five years. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a labor market report in February that said computer science graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1%. That was higher than other majors, such as history at 4.6% and biology at 3%. Other business leaders like "Shark Tank" star Mark Cuban and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have criticized Amodei's prediction. Cuban voiced his disagreement with Amodei in a post on Bluesky, arguing that "new companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment."
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
Paul Graham's guide to how you can save your job from AI
Paul Graham, the founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, said identifying and leaning into your passions will be the best way to secure your job in the age of AI. "It may be a mistake to ask which occupations are most safe from being taken by AI," Graham wrote in an X post on Tuesday. "What AI (in its current form) is good at is not so much certain jobs, but a certain way of working. It's good at scutwork. So that's the thing to avoid," he continued. Graham said programming jobs "at the bottom end" are not safe from AI, adding that "those jobs are already disappearing." Top programmers "who are good enough to start their own companies," on the other hand, can still command top salaries, he wrote. "So I think the best general advice for protecting oneself from AI is to do something so well that you're operating way above the level of scutwork," Graham said. Representatives for Graham at Y Combinator did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Graham said that to become a superstar in your chosen field, you've got to have passion. "It's hard to do something really well if you're not deeply interested in it," he added. Graham isn't the only one who has acknowledged AI's disruptive potential on the job market. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan in a January interview that he expects AI to be able to write code like a midlevel engineer within this year. Then, in May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios in an interview that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs in the next five years. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a labor market report in February that said computer science graduates faced an unemployment rate of 6.1%. That was higher than other majors, such as history at 4.6% and biology at 3%. Other business leaders like "Shark Tank" star Mark Cuban and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have criticized Amodei's prediction. Cuban voiced his disagreement with Amodei in a post on Bluesky, arguing that "new companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment." Huang told reporters at the VivaTech 2025 conference in Paris in June that AI could also create new opportunities, while some jobs could disappear. "Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone's. It's changed mine," Huang said.
Time of India
03-08-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Anthropic CEO throws shade at Mark Zuckerberg's billion-dollar AI talent hunt with dartboard dig: ‘You can't buy purpose with a paycheck'
Culture Over Cash You Might Also Like: Billionaire Vinod Khosla predicts AI teachers will disrupt education and careers. Here's how — BigTechPod (@BigTechPod) The AI Hiring Wars: A Battle for Brains Buying Purpose? Not Quite, Says Amodei In the escalating turf war for top AI talent, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has delivered a pointed, and slightly humorous, critique of Meta 's aggressive recruitment tactics. Speaking on the Big Technology Podcast, Amodei painted a vivid picture: "If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dartboard and it hits your name, that doesn't mean you should be paid ten times more than the guy next to you who's just as skilled."His remarks come amid widespread reports of Meta launching an all-out offensive to poach AI engineers from rivals like OpenAI, Apple, Google, and Anthropic itself. Yet Amodei claims his startup has remained largely untouched. 'Some [employees] wouldn't even talk to Meta,' he said, asserting that their culture and mission are more attractive than any compensation package Meta can has reportedly been dangling massive offers, with some packages surpassing $200 million for a single hire, according to Business Insider and WIRED. Amodei, however, says Anthropic refuses to match such sums, insisting on fair and consistent pay across the board."I recently posted in our company Slack that we will not compromise our compensation principles or fairness if someone gets a big offer," he shared. In his view, rewarding one employee disproportionately just because they were on Meta's radar would be unjust to their equally capable this stance, Meta has managed to lure away at least one former Anthropic engineer—Joel Pobar—but Amodei suggests their broader impact has been latest AI moonshot, the Superintelligence Lab , has ignited a fierce scramble for elite minds. OpenAI's Chief Research Officer Mark Chen likened it to a break-in after losing several staffers overnight. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Meta of deploying 'giant offers' to lure talent, with some signing bonuses rumored to top $100 is unapologetic about the ambition. In an internal memo seen by CNBC, he claimed, 'Developing superintelligence is coming into sight,' declaring his goal to bring personal AI to every individual, not just enterprise Meta may have the resources, Amodei questions whether mission-driven AI work can be bought. 'Zuckerberg is trying to buy something that can't be bought,' he said during the podcast, underscoring Anthropic's long-term focus on safe and ethical AI sentiment resonates with other industry leaders too. OpenAI continues to frame itself as a purpose-first organization, while Meta's flashier, big-money moves risk creating tension even within its own teams. As CNBC reported, some insiders at Meta worry that a talent-heavy, cash-fueled approach could lead to ego clashes and fractured the current AI landscape, where demand far outpaces supply, the value of a skilled AI researcher is rivaling that of a professional athlete. Yet, for companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, the real challenge isn't just retaining talent—it's maintaining a sense of purpose amid the frenzy.
