Meta's AGI Talent Exodus: Money Can't Buy Loyalty

Mark Zuckerberg's high-profile AI recruitment spree is unraveling faster than anyone expected. Despite throwing obscene amounts of cash at top AI researchers - reportedly up to a billion dollars - Meta's superintelligence dreams are hitting a major talent roadblock.

The revolving door at Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL) is spinning at dizzying speeds. Shengjia Zhao, a ChatGPT co-creator who was named Meta's chief AI scientist, threatened to quit almost immediately after arriving and has already signed papers to return to OpenAI. Talk about a spectacular recruitment failure!

This isn't an isolated incident. Machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight, former OpenAI researcher Avi Verma, and research scientist Rishabh Agarwal all jumped ship shortly after coming aboard. Even long-time Meta veterans Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan have abandoned the AI mission after nine and ten years of service.

The irony is delicious - Rishabh Agarwal, who Meta reportedly paid $1 million to poach from Google DeepMind, quoted Zuckerberg himself when announcing his departure: "In a world that's changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk." I guess working at Meta wasn't risky enough!

What's behind this mass exodus? Reports point to constant restructuring, shifting priorities, and Zuckerberg's suffocating micromanagement. The company recently split its AI staff into four teams, creating even more chaos inside MSL.

DeepMind's Demis Hassabis hit the nail on the head when he told Lex Fridman that frontier researchers care more about "stewarding the technology safely into the world" than chasing fat paychecks. But perhaps Anthropic's Benjamin Mann put it most bluntly: "My best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity. My best case at Meta is we make money."

Meanwhile, OpenAI - which had criticized Meta's recruitment tactics as "distasteful" - is now happily scooping up the disgruntled talent. Oh, the sweet taste of revenge!

For all Zuckerberg's big talk about risk-taking, he's now watching his superintelligence dreams crumble as his expensive hires walk out the door. Money, it seems, can't buy vision or loyalty in the race for artificial general intelligence.