Money no longer matters to AI’s top talent

Today on Decoder we’re going to talk about the war for AI talent. Right now, the hottest job market on the planet is for AI researchers. The vast majority of these people are concentrated into a small number of hugely valuable, extremely fast-growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nowadays, such companies are paying some of the highest salaries in the history of the tech industry to poach researchers from one another. It feels like every time one of these AI researchers leaves one company for another, they tell us exactly why. Sometimes they’re simply resigning to go be a poet. Sometimes they’re chasing a mission. Sometimes they’re worried that AI is going to imperil humanity, destroy all jobs, and plunge the world into chaos. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. They’re really saying these things. They’re publishing these notes on X, in blog posts, or in the case of one former OpenAI safety researcher by writing a full New York Times op-ed. I’ve been dying to really dig in and try to unpack what’s going on with all these talent moves in AI. So my guest today is Verge senior AI reporter Hayden Field, who’s been covering the revolving door of the AI industry really closely and also the broader culture that’s motivating the AI workers to jump ship and the companies that are ruthlessly trying to hire them. Those motivations vary. Sure, all these people are paid extravagant salaries, but as you’ll hear Hayden say, a stronger motivating force is ideology and mission. The people working on AI, by and large, believe that what they’re doing is going to radically change the world, and they’re not really in desperate need of more money. So that really changes the incentive structures that might push people to leave, say, OpenAI for Anthropic, or to quit Elon Musk’s xAI now that it’s been acquired by SpaceX. At the same time, the incentives of the AI companies themselves are going from raising money to making money. Reporting suggests OpenAI and maybe even Anthropic could go public this year, and doing so would create a historic amount of wealth. It would also put new kinds of pressure on these companies to be more transparent about how they spend money and to be much more accountable for returning on the huge investments that they’ve raised so far. There’s a lot in this conversation. The AI industry right now is full of drama. There’s big characters, bitter rivalries, lots of money, and really, really long blog posts about the end of the world. If you’d like to read more about what we discussed in this episode, check out these links: What’s behind the mass exodus at xAI? | The Verge OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger is joining OpenAI | The Verge Two more xAI co-founders leave after the SpaceX merger | The Verge AI safety leader says ‘world is in peril’ and quits to study poetry | BBC OpenAI is making the mistakes Facebook made. I quit. | The New York Times Anthropic’s chief on AI: ‘We don’t know if the models are conscious’ | The New York Times Meet the one woman Anthropic trusts to teach AI morals | The Wall Street Journal OpenAI plans fourth-quarter IPO in race to beat Anthropic to market | The Wall Street Journal Questions or comments about this episode? Hit us up at decoder@theverge.com. We really do read every email!