The great AI talent tug-of-war is underway — and xAI is now in the ring.
Elon Musk’s startup has yanked at least 14 researchers and engineers from Meta’s grip since January, according to a Business Insider analysis of LinkedIn profiles.
Some have joined as recently as a few weeks ago, according to their profiles, showing the battle to secure the brightest minds in AI is far from over as big tech rivals continue to raid each other’s ranks.
That includes people like Xinlei Chen, who was a research scientist at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR, team until he jumped ship in June, per his LinkedIn.
Chen focuses on multimodal forms of AI, like images and videos, a field Meta’s new ‘superintelligence’ team is aggressively hiring for. So does Ching-Yao Chuang, another former Meta research scientist who left for xAI in May.
Others Meta departures include Alan Rice, a former data center manager who left in April and is now working for xAI based out of Memphis, Tennessee, the site of xAI’s biggest supercomputer hub.
Sheng Sen — an AI research scientist who helped scale Meta’s flagship Llama AI models — also joined xAI in April, according to his LinkedIn.
Spokespeople for Meta and xAI did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.
“Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high),” Musk said in an X post on Sunday. “Also, xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta. And we are hyper merit-based: do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher.”
Just last month, Meta hired Shengjia Zhao — a co-creator of ChatGPT — as chief scientist of its new Superintelligence Labs, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering multimillion-dollar compensation packages to lure AI experts away from rivals. Meta also brought on three researchers who helped launch OpenAI’s Zurich office.
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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been vocal about Zuckerberg’s tactic of dangling hefty compensation offers. In an episode of the “Big Technology Podcast,” which aired last week, Amodei said he thinks Meta is “trying to buy something that cannot be bought and that is alignment with the mission.”
Amodei said Anthropopic employees received and turned down lucrative offers, and the company chose not to counter with inflated individual pay packages because it went against its principles of fairness and could damage company culture.
“If Mark Zuckerberg throws a dart at a dart board and hits your name, it doesn’t mean you should be paid 10x more than the guy next to you who’s just as skilled or talented,” he said.
Elsewhere in the AI talent shuffle, Microsoft has poached more than two dozen Google employees in recent months, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
xAI has also poached a number of engineers from Musk’s other companies over the years. The company currently employs about 40 former Tesla employees and a handful of former SpaceX staffers, a LinkedIn analysis shows. Business Insider previously reported that xAI hired a number of Tesla engineers shortly after the electric carmaker initiated mass layoffs in April 2024. xAI employs around 1,200 people, including an army of AI tutors that train the company’s chatbot, internal documentation shows.
Earlier this year, an internal xAI organizational chart showed the company’s project lead for its Colossus data center was Daniel Rowland. A hardware engineer named Daniel Rowland has worked on Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer since 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile and internal documentation reviewed by Business Insider at the time.
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