Despite $2M salaries, Meta can't keep AI staff — talent reportedly flocks to rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic

As companies pour billions of dollars into AI infrastructure, demand for AI talent to program and run these AI data centers is also greatly increasing. Deedy Das, a Venture Capitalist at Menlo Ventures and a former Google Search staff member, posted on X that Meta has an over $2 million annual pay package for AI talent, but still keeps losing its people to OpenAI and Anthropic. He said that he’s personally heard three such cases this week alone, which is major news given the size of Meta’s compensation.

Statistics say that for every 10.6 from DeepMind, 8.2 from OpenAI, and 2 from Hugging Face that move to Anthropic, it only loses one employee for each company. This movement shows that the startup is quickly growing and that many people from competing AI labs want to work for it. We don’t know how much the company offers, though, but we can safely assume that it’s at least on par or, more likely, substantially larger than what the competition pays.

According to the SignalFire research, beyond salary, Anthropic's edge is a unique culture that embraces "unconventional thinkers" and gives employees true autonomy, as well as flexible work options, a lack of title politics and forced management tracks. Furthermore, employees report an embrace of intellectual discourse and researcher autonomy, compared to bureaucracy elsewhere.

Aside from this, Das also mentioned that Anthropic has an unusually high two-year employee retention rate. The tech industry average is around 40% to 50%, with the retention rate dropping over the past couple of years due to layoffs. However, many AI startups’ two-year retention rates vary between 63% and 80%, with Anthropic holding the top spot. Next to it is Google’s DeepMind, which has a retention rate of 78%.

Many new employees who work in AI labs also come from major tech giants. It’s estimated that 5.4% of new hires come from Google’s non-AI divisions, while 4.3% are former Meta staffers. A further 3.2% used to work with Microsoft, and another 2.7% are ex-Amazon employees, while 2.1% were previously affiliated with Stripe, and 1.7% came from Apple. This accounts for nearly 20% of new employees in AI labs that have come from tech giants.

Massive tech companies used to be the dream job for many people, especially as they offered competitive pay, strong career growth, many opportunities within the industry, and prestige. However, 2024 was a bad year for the tech sector, with many companies laying off thousands of people. Intel was one of the biggest losers, with the company laying off 15% of its workforce (roughly 15,000 employees) after its disastrous August 2024 financial report. However, other companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Dell, and AMD were also hit with workforce reductions.

On the other hand, the continued growth in the AI sector is pushing many talented individuals towards these startups, as shown by the data. This will likely continue in the near future, as companies and nations continuously build more and more AI data centers.

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