The middle In the last 12 months, at least 3 major AI “acqui-hires” in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI Google brought its CEO on board, Alexandre Wang spent a cool $2.4 billion Nvidia and DeepMind have agreed to merge their research and development teams and license Windsurf’s technology. wagered $20 billion Groq’s technology for inference and its staff.
Frontier AI laboratories have also been engaged in a game of musical chair talent that has high stakes. This latest reshuffle began three weeks agoOpenAI rehired several researchers that had left less than two year earlier for another company. Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines. Anthropic is also poaching ChatGPT talent. OpenAI is also a part of the OpenAI family. just hired A former Anthropic researcher is to become its “head of preparedness.”
Silicon Valley is experiencing a hiring boom and a hiring slump. “great unbundling” Dave Munichiello is an investor with GV. Early tech startups and their employees would often stay on until the company went under or a liquidity event occurred. Today’s market is characterized by a booming generative AI startup, which has plenty of money and is coveted for its research talent. “you invest in a startup knowing it could be broken up,” Munichiello told me.
Researchers and early-stage founders at some of the most buzzed about AI companies are constantly moving from company to company for different reasons. Money is a big motivator for most. Meta reportedly offered top AI researchers in 2017 compensation packages. tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, offering them not just access to cutting-edge computing resources but also … generational wealth.
It’s not just about becoming rich. Sayash Kapoor says the recent cultural shifts in tech have led some workers to worry about being tied down for too many years by a single company or institution. Previously, employers assumed that employees would remain at their companies for the full four years when stock options are scheduled to vest. In the highminded 2000s-2010s era, many early employees and cofounders also believed sincerely in the stated mission of their company and wanted to stay there to achieve it.
Kapoor: “people understand the limitations of the institutions they’re working in, and founders are more pragmatic.” Kapoor believes that, in the case of Windsurf for example, its founders may have calculated they could make a bigger impact at Google with their resources. Kapoor says that the same shift has been happening in academia. Kapoor reports that in the past five-years, more PhDs have left their computer science doctoral programs for jobs within industry. Kapoor says there are greater opportunity costs to staying in a place when AI innovations are rapidly increasing.
In order to safeguard themselves, investors are taking measures in an effort not to become collateral damage. Max Gazor is the founder and CEO of Striker Venture Partners. His team is currently vetting startup teams. “for chemistry and cohesion more than ever.” Gazor reports that deals are increasingly likely to include “protective provisions that require board consent for material IP licensing or similar scenarios.”
Gazor notes some of the most significant acqui-hire transactions that occurred recently included startups established long before this current AI boom. Scale AI for instance was founded in 2016. At that time, the deal Wang made with Meta might have seemed impossible to most. The potential outcome of these deals can be considered now in terms sheets. “constructively managed,” Gazor gives an explanation.
