Anthropic Co-Founder Says Meta Attempted The Same Multi-Million-Dollar Tactic To Lure His Employees, Says He Does Not Blame Anyone Who Took Those Offers, But Believes His Team Is ‘Mission-Oriented’

Mega-million-dollar offers is Meta’s trump card for luring exceptional talent to work on its Superintelligence Labs, with a previous employee list revealing that out of 44 people working in this division, 40 percent were formerly working at OpenAI. Naturally, the social media behemoth would leave no stone unturned as it prowls around looking to snare employees with lucrative offers, and as you can guess, Anthropic was not left out.

Fortunately, the company behind Claude reportedly has people who believe in the mission rather than those looking to pocket mammoth paydays, and the co-founder explains that while he cannot blame anyone for entertaining those offers, some employees have different priorities than others.

In an episode of Lenny’s Podcast, Benjamin Mann, the co-founder of Anthropic, who left his job at OpenAI to pursue his own startup, says that various people have ‘different life circumstances’ when referring to what their preference lies in working for AI firms. He also believes that the $100 million signing bonuses offered by Meta are real, and says that the amount is low compared to the value being made.

“I’m pretty sure it’s real. To pay individuals like $100 million over a four-year package, that’s actually pretty cheap compared to the value created for the business. We’re just in an unprecedented era of scale, and it’s only going to get crazier.”

As for why Antropic employees have yet to jump ship to Meta, Mann believes that the people currently stationed there are mission-oriented and they have given priority to how the company affects the future of humanity over how much money they can make.

“I think we’ve been maybe much less affected than many of the other companies in the space because people here are so mission-oriented. They get these offers and then they say, ‘Well, of course I’m not going to leave because my best case scenario at Meta is that we make money, and my best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity.”

As reported by Business Insider, Mann and other individuals left OpenAI in 2020 to start Anthropic because ‘safety wasn’t the top priority there.’ Meta has largely been successful with its poaching tactics, as it managed to recruit Apple’s head of foundation models for a nice $200 million signing bonus. Then again, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes that this approach will create the wrong company culture.

News Source: Business Insider