![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/7d66d27c345dfdb65d9c85de51dcbbf1d4-officeAI-screentime.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
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By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms<\/a> and Privacy Notice<\/a> and to receive email correspondence from us.<\/p>\n Last month, reports surfaced of some mind-boggling job offers in the tech industry<\/a>, where the employment situation is otherwise grim. AI researchers were being lured with packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The New York Times compared<\/a> the industry\u2019s hiring practices to the NBA, noting that \u201crecruiting A.I. free agents has become a spectacle on social media, much like the period before a trade deadline in sports.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s nine-figure bids, and some are refusing<\/a> to make counteroffers at all. Why?<\/p>\n Among the constellation of big tech companies (Google, Microsoft, and Meta), mature start-ups (OpenAI<\/a> and Anthropic), product-less new ventures (Safe Superintelligence, Thinking Machines Lab), application companies (Cursor, Replit), and, uh, \u201cother\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The surface-level story isn\u2019t 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 \u2014 in part because the company had just pivoted to the \u201cmetaverse.\u201d 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\u2019t competitive.<\/p>\n It also hasn\u2019t helped that Zuckerberg\u2019s recent, Altman-esque attempts<\/a> 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 \u2014\u00a0replacing friends with AI, a vaguely defined \u201csuperintelligence\u201d that will somehow mainly benefit individuals \u2014\u00a0it comes across as borrowed and incoherent even by the low standards of CEO AI prognostication<\/a>. And whatever motives you might ascribe to the leaders of AI firms, the talent they\u2019re pursuing tends to be \u2014 by a few definitions of the word \u2014\u00a0somewhat idealistic. If they\u2019re worried about AI risk, they\u2019re probably more inclined to work for someone like Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei than Mark Zuckerberg circa 2025. If they\u2019re interested in pure research, they\u2019re probably going to want to work for people they see as fellow pure researchers \u2014\u00a0people like Google\u2019s Demis Hassabis or a founder like Ilya Sutskever. If they\u2019re a bit more accelerationist and spend a lot of time absorbing the sort of AI discourse that\u2019s popular on X \u2014\u00a0or if they\u2019re just looking at where concentrations of like-minded talent already exist \u2014 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 \u201ccracked\u201d AI engineer: lots of resources, few guardrails, proximity to Elon Musk, and a corresponding ideological mission<\/a>. Perhaps most importantly, setting aside various specific motivations and theories of what the AI arms race really is, you won\u2019t 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\u2019s entertainment-centric<\/a>, slop-and-advertising-adjacent<\/a> approach to actually monetizing AI so far represents a realistic if disheartening path toward extracting value from LLMs.)<\/p>\n That Mark Zuckerberg has a weaker future-of-AI pitch than the MechaHitler<\/a> guy goes a long way toward explaining his company\u2019s outlier offers (recent stories about internal materials allowing \u201csensual<\/a>\u201d chats with kids certainly can\u2019t help). But elements of Meta\u2019s 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<\/a>, reporting on constant internal restructurings (the fourth in six months is underway, according<\/a> to the Information), unclear priorities, and bruising demands to work on products that, so far, have been poorly received. While punishing \u201c9-9-6\u201d\u2013style work schedules are becoming more common at AI firms<\/a>, employees are often motivated by genuine enthusiasm, fear of their companies losing a high-stakes race<\/a>, and, of course, lots of equity tied to their work\u2019s success. Since 2023, Meta\u2019s general orientation toward its employees has become much harsher, with layoffs and public warnings from leadership sharply diverging<\/a> from the company\u2019s financial performance. A widely circulated internal memo from a (now former) AI researcher at Meta warned<\/a> that a \u201cmetastatic cancer\u201d was threatening the company\u2019s work culture. Last week, in a post meant to push back<\/a> against \u201csensationalist\u201d reporting on the memo, he described his intention to draw attention to the \u201cunhealthy\u201d traits of the AI organization and wasn\u2019t actually much gentler:<\/p>\n \u2022 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 The necessity of a culture and processes that enable \u2018big projects\u2019 to come to fruition.<\/p>\n \u2022 The management culture not promoting a sense of camaraderie among employees, leading to a lack of sense of belonging.<\/p>\n \u2022 Instability in team assignments, leading to experience not building up and crystallizing over time.<\/p>\n \u2022 A wavering vision that was tough for team members to enthusiastically rally behind.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s constant attempts at reinvention might be coming due, and that management\u2019s attempts to discipline its workforce may have had unforeseen costs. It\u2019s a bearish signal for Meta\u2019s AI efforts and tells a slightly different story than the company\u2019s wave of mega-offers first implied: Billion-dollar<\/a> bids aren\u2019t the new norm for top AI hires. In the talent war, they just happen to be Meta\u2019s only weapon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts Get an email alert as soon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,289,290,18,19,17,9297,1721,1722,9298,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-9435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-john-herrman","15":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","16":"tag-meta","17":"tag-screen-time","18":"tag-technology"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n