Latest news with #talentwars
Fast Company
5 days ago
- Business
- Fast Company
What is the reverse-acquihire?
It's not uncommon for large companies to acquire startups primarily for their talent rather than their product. Acquihires, as they are called, allow big companies to gain talented employees, while bypassing traditional methods of hiring. However, as the AI talent wars have heated up, major companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have been engaging in reverse-acquihires at AI startups. That is, they are swooping in to hire star talent and license technology, discarding the rest by the wayside. The tech giants gain talent while sidestepping the need for government approval and antitrust scrutiny that would happen if they bought the company outright. The remaining employees are left to flounder in the husk of their former company. By Bloomberg's count there have been six since last March, and as the AI talent wars continue, we're likely to see more. 6. Google DeepMind and Windsurf In July 2025, Google's DeepMind division hired Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan and cofounder Douglas Chen, along with other key members of their R&D team. The $2.4 billion deal also included Windsurf technology. Google did not take a stake or any controlling interest in the startup. The deal came after Windsurf was nearly sold to OpenAI in what was set to be a $3 billion deal. The Windsurf employees whom Google did not hire went from expecting to be part of OpenAI to being left behind at a company with no leaders. In a surprise twist Windsurf was quickly acquired by AI coding startup, Cognition. Still, the story doesn't have a happy ending. Shortly afterwards, Cognition laid off 30 members of Windsurf's team and offered buyouts to the remaining 200 TechCrunch reported. 5. Meta and Scale AI This June, Meta finalized a deal with data labeling company Scale AI. Meta acquired a group of its top engineers, including founder Alexandr Wang, and took a 49% stake in the company, for a $15 billion price tag. 'As part of this, we will deepen the work we do together producing data for AI models and Alexandr Wang will join Meta to work on our superintelligence efforts,' a Meta spokesperson said. A month later, Scale laid off 14% of its workforce. Interim CEO Jason Droege said the company plans to focus on its government and enterprise businesses going forward. 4. Google and In August 2024, Google also struck a deal with chatbot startup hiring its founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, as part of a $2.7 billion deal. 'We're excited to announce that we've entered into an agreement with Google that will allow us to accelerate our progress,' said in a statement at the time. The statement also explained that the startup would grant a nonexclusive license to the tech giant for its LLM technology. In the wake of the reverse-acquihire, has shifted to a cheaper business model. Instead of training LLMs, it simply develops AI characters. Interim CEO Dominic Perella told Bloomberg: 'We were left much better positioned than some folks,' pointing out that for a reverse-acquihire is doing well. 3. Amazon and Covariant In August 2024, Amazon hired robotics company Covariant's three founders (Peter Chen, Pieter Abbeel, and Rocky Duan) as well as about a quarter of the staff. They also received a nonexclusive license to Covariant's robotic foundation models. According to a whistleblower, Amazon paid $380 million, which is much higher than $119.5 million, which is when deals need to be reported to the FTC. The Washington Post reported that according to the whistleblower's filing, Covariant's current CEO, Ted Stinson, said if Amazon had bought the company outright, the deal would have been killed by antitrust authorities. According to the whistleblower, the deal restricts which licenses Covariant can sell without paying a fee to Amazon, hobbling its ability to grow. The whistleblower's filing said Covariant was only expected to last for a year after the deal went through. 2. Amazon and Adept Similarly, in June 2024, Amazon hired CEO David Luan and most of the AI startup Adept's 100-person team in a deal that also included licensing the startup's technology. At the time, Adept, which had raised $400 million, was developing AI agents to do software tasks, and the deal came before it had launched a product. Post-deal a blog post from Adept seemed to suggest that the company was now low in fund and needed to shift to a cheaper business model. 'Continuing with Adept's initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would've required spending significant attention on fundraising…' the post stated. 'Adept will now focus entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI, which will continue to be powered by a combination of our existing state-of-the-art in-house models, agentic data, web interaction software, and custom infrastructure.' In December 2024, Amazon announced it was launching a new lab led by David Luan that would build AI agents that can 'handle complex workflows.' Only around 20 employees remained at Adept after the Amazon deal. Bloomberg noted only four people currently list Adept as their employer on LinkedIn. 1. Microsoft and Inflection Microsoft kicked off the reverse acquihire trend last March when it agreed to pay chatbot startup Inflection about $653 million in a deal that effectively gutted the startup. The move included hiring founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonya and most of Inflection's staff. Around $620 million was for nonexclusive licensing rights to Inflection's AI models, and a $33 million payment for Inflection to waive any legal claims related to the hiring of its staff. Inflection had raised $1.3 billion in June 2023. However, Bloomberg noted CEO Suleyman was worried about the company's ability to raise enough funds to stay viable given the size of its competition. The deal triggered a FTC investigation to determine whether it was designed to avoid antitrust review while allowing Microsoft control over Inflection. Inflection is still in operation, but has changed course to focus from building new AI models to working on AI in the enterprise space. Sean White, a former Mozilla executive, became the new CEO. White told Bloomberg that Inflection is still in rebuilding mode: 'The ship, over time, was slowly replaced, board by board, piece by piece, right? But it was still always the same ship,' he said.
The Verge
11-08-2025
- Business
- The Verge
Here I am on CNBC talking about the AI talent wars.
Posted Aug 11, 2025 at 4:37 PM UTC Here I am on CNBC talking about the AI talent wars. It's basic supply and demand, folks! Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates. Alex Heath Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Alex Heath Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Business
Entrepreneur
08-08-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Meta Makes Billion-Dollar Job Offer Competing for AI Talent
Skyrocketing salaries and secretive recruiting efforts have taken over Big Tech as the AI talent wars heat up, with companies including Meta, Google, and Microsoft vying for employees by offering highly competitive compensation. A key player in the battle is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 41, who reportedly offered Andrew Tulloch, an AI researcher and co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, a compensation package worth as much as $1.5 billion over at least six years. The Wall Street Journal reported that Tulloch turned down the offer, but plenty of others have taken the money and joined Zuckerberg's tech giant. Related: Meta Is Reportedly Offering Up to Nine-Figure Pay for Researchers on Its New Superintelligence AI Team Scale AI co-founder and former CEO Alexandr Wang, 28, joined Meta after the company paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in his company. In a June memo, Zuckerberg called Wang "the most impressive founder of his generation," and said that in addition to leading Meta's superintelligence team, Wang would also be Meta's Chief AI Officer. Zuckerberg also highlighted the massive scale of talent poaching happening in Silicon Valley by revealing that other members of his superintelligence group, now called TBD Labs, per a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal, include researchers poached from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Meanwhile, Apple has also lost talent to Meta, with four AI researchers joining Zuckerberg's company in July alone. Meta offered former Apple manager Ruoming Pang a reported $200 million compensation package in early July to join Meta's superintelligence effort — and Pang accepted. Zuckerberg reportedly played a personal role in recruiting the TBD Labs team, secretly inviting potential hires to join him at his homes in Palo Alto and Lake Tahoe to discuss offers. According to Bloomberg, Zuckerberg even rearranged the seating arrangements in Meta's offices to position the superintelligence team closer to him. Mark Zuckerberg. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images The AI push in hiring mirrors a deep investment in AI infrastructure, with Meta committing up to $72 billion, Microsoft $80 billion, and Google up to $85 billion towards building AI facilities this year. Here's a look at how others are competing: Related: Google Is Paying $2.7 Billion to Reportedly Rehire an Early Employee Who Built an AI Chatbot Before ChatGPT Microsoft Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman has been looking at his former workplace, Google, for fresh AI talent to join the Microsoft team. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Suleyman, who worked at Google for over a decade and rose to lead the applied AI team, has been copying Zuckerberg by reaching out to recruits personally and offering them better pay. So far, Suleyman's efforts have resulted in Microsoft poaching at least 24 employees from Google, mostly from the DeepMind AI group, per WSJ. The poaching includes executives and researchers alike, including Google's former Vice President of Engineering, Amar Subramanya. The median salary at Microsoft last year was $193,744, according to a proxy filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Google Google signed a $2.4 billion deal with AI coding startup Windsurf last month to bring key talent to the Google DeepMind AI team. Windsurf's co-founder and CEO, Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and a select group of other researchers from the startup joined Google. As part of the deal, Google obtained a nonexclusive license to Windsurf technology. Google did the same thing last year, signing a $2.7 billion agreement with a personalized superintelligence startup, in exchange for access to talent, particularly Character AI co-founders Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas. In this deal, too, Google received a nonexclusive license to the startup's technology. OpenAI OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 40, said in mid-June that Meta had been offering its staff $100 million signing bonuses and "even more than that" in overall compensation in an attempt to poach them away. Meta's Chief Technology Officer, Andrew Bosworth, refuted the claim. By the end of June, eight OpenAI researchers had taken the offer and joined Meta's superintelligence team. In a June 28 memo to staff, OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen likened the situation to someone breaking into his home and stealing something. He promised that OpenAI was "recalibrating" compensation in response to the offers while keeping pay "fair" for everyone.
Yahoo
08-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Dario Amodei says Anthropic hasn't been hit as hard as rivals in the AI talent wars — and it boils down to 2 things
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he's not sweating Meta's massive offers to lure away top talent. Amodei says Anthropic, which did see at least one employee poached, is faring well "relative to other companies." Belief in Anthropic's long-term equity, Amodei said, is helping convince his employees to stay put. 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." Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
04-08-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
'No names': A brief moment in an interview with OpenAI engineers highlights the state of the AI talent wars
An OpenAI engineer praised the company's talented AI debuggers during a podcast — without naming them. The brief moment highlights just how fierce the AI talent wars have gotten, with rivals pursuing specific star engineers. Mark Zuckerberg has poached numerous OpenAI staffers in recent months for Meta's Superintelligence Lab. An OpenAI engineer said some of the company's "most-prized" talent is focused on debugging AI models — just don't expect him to mention their names. OpenAI chief data scientist Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, an OpenAI technical fellow, recently appeared on the "Before AGI" podcast and chatted about working at the company. A brief exchange in the episode stands out for what isn't said — and is an indicator of just how protective AI companies have become amid the AI talent wars, as Big Tech circles star employees. "We hired a bunch more people at OpenAI who are really great at debugging," Sidor said while speaking about the importance of debugging AI models. "And I think those are some of our most-prized employees, and I won't even…" Before Sidor could complete his thought (he mentions not going into "details"), another person on the podcast interjects by saying, "No names," before laughter can be heard. It's unclear who jumped in with "No names" — it was either OpenAI's Pachocki or podcast host Aleksander Mądry. While it would typically be easy to figure that out by watching the video version of the podcast, that part of the exchange is absent in both of the video versions published to YouTube and X. (You can hear that bit in the audio-only version on Spotify and Apple podcasts.) Business Insider reached out to Madry and OpenAI for comment. Mądry, the host of "Before AGI," is an MIT professor who is working at OpenAI while on leave from the university, where he is director of the MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning. Regardless of why the exchange isn't found in the video version of the podcast (it's entirely possible the video version was simply edited down for length or flow or some other reason), Sidor's apparent reluctance to name-drop those employees he feels are some of OpenAI's "most-prized" is telling — if not particularly surprising. After all, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly created a list of names of AI stars to poach for Meta's Superintelligence Lab, and successfully hired away Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former lead scientist at OpenAI, and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, among others. Sam Altman said earlier this year that Meta was offering his company's top researchers up to $100 million compensation packages, and Google recently hired away Windsurf's CEO and multiple employees who had been set to join OpenAI. It's an all-out fight over top AI talent — so it's understandable that an OpenAI engineer might want to be tight-lipped. Read the original article on Business Insider Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
