Meta needs to work harder if they want to personify the AI talent war. At least that's what CEO Dario Amodei is saying.
Amodei said that humanity is generally better than competition in the efforts of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to poach top talent from rivals, with the reported wage package being reported at $100 million.
“You can see publicly a list of people who have gone to Meta Super Intelligence Lab,” Amodey told Stripe co-founder John Collison on Collison's “Cheeky Pints” podcast. “Even if you normalize because of our size,” he said, “many people turned them down.”
“I think we did well compared to other companies. We may have had a relatively advantage,” added the CEO of humanity.
Amodei said his employees have chosen to stay primarily because of a mix of loyalty and potential financial benefits.
“It's like a mix of true belief in the mission and belief in the benefits of fairness,” Amodei said. “I think humanity has created a reputation by doing what it does or by making less promises, but we maintain the promises we make.”
Humanity is not emerging unharmed from AI Talent Wars. Meta worked on reasoning and successfully hired Joel Poval, a well-known human employee who previously spent 11 years in Meta.
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Zuckerberg also poached ChatGpt co-creator and former lead scientist at Openai, Shengjia Zhao, and hired Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead the Meta super intelligence group. Amodei recently said that some of his employees “will not even talk to Mark Zuckerberg.”
Some recent employment and retention data provide more insight into the evolving head count of humanity. Venture Firm SignalFire discovered that humanity is hiring less engineers about 2.68 times faster than losing engineers, and the Wall Street Journal found that compared to Openai, Meta and Google, there is a higher percentage of people hiring new engineers than losing new engineers.
Humanity was founded in 2021 by seven former Openai employees, including Amodei. I shared the belief that AI has both the potential for both illness and goodness. In 2023, the company published a 22-page document responsibly focusing on AI cultivation. Amodei speaks openly about the need for a society to predict that he will be massive white-collar unemployment in the near future as a result of AI advances.
Humanity is often seen as a company focused on AI safety, but its leaders consider its mission broader.
“I hope that it's not just a single company that focuses on AI systems safety or AI systems inconsistency, but a company where everyone thinks about public purposes,” Amodei said in 2024.
