Loyalty is dead in Silicon Valley

Since the middle In the past year, there have been at least three key AI “employees” in Silicon Valley. Dead invested Over $14 billion in AI scale It brought in its CEO, Alexander Wang; Google Spent $2.4 billion To license Windsurf technology and bring its founders and research teams into DeepMind; And Nvidia I bet $20 billion developed Groq’s inference technology and hired its CEO and other employees.

Meanwhile, frontier AI labs have been playing a high-stakes, never-ending game of musical chairs. Last edit It started three weeks agowhen OpenAI announced that it would rehire several researchers who left less than two years ago to join Mira Moratti’s startup, Thinking Machines. At the same time, Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees, was poaching talent from the maker of ChatGPT. OpenAI in turn, Just rented A former human safety researcher to be the “Chief of Preparedness”.

The hiring move happening in Silicon Valley represents the “big cannibalization” of the tech startup, said Dave Monicello, an investor at GV. In previous eras, technology founders and their early employees often stayed with the company until the lights went out or there was a major liquidity event. But in today’s market, where AI startups are growing rapidly, equipped with a lot of capital, and especially valued for the strength of their research talent, “you invest in a startup knowing that it can be cannibalized,” Monicello told me.

Founders and early researchers at the most popular AI startups move to different companies for a variety of reasons. The big motivator for many is money, of course. Last year, Meta was reportedly offering compensation packages to the world’s top AI researchers Tens or hundreds of millions of dollarsproviding them not only with access to cutting-edge computing resources but also…generational wealth.

But it’s not just about getting rich. Broader cultural shifts that have shaken the tech industry in recent years have made some employees wary about sticking with one company or organization for too long, says Sayash Kapoor, a computer science researcher at Princeton University and a senior fellow at Mozilla. Employers used to assume that workers would stay at least until the four-year mark when their stock options were typically scheduled to vest. In the high-minded era of the 2000s and 2000s, many founders and early employees believed wholeheartedly in their companies’ stated missions and wanted to be there to help achieve them.

“Now, people understand the constraints of the organizations they work in, and founders are becoming more realistic,” says Kapoor. Windsurf’s founders, for example, may have calculated that their impact could be greater at a place like Google that had a lot of resources, Kapoor says. A similar shift is happening within academia, he adds. Kapoor says that over the past five years he has seen more PhD researchers leaving computer science PhD programs for jobs in industry. He says there are higher opportunity costs associated with staying in one place at a time when AI innovation is rapidly accelerating.

Investors, concerned about becoming collateral damage in the AI ​​talent wars, are taking steps to protect themselves. Max Gazor, founder of Striker Venture Partners, says his team is examining founding teams “in terms of chemistry and cohesion more than ever before.” It’s also increasingly common for deals to include “preemptive provisions requiring board approval for licensing of material intellectual property or similar scenarios,” Gazor says.

Gazor points out that some of the biggest recent acquisitions have involved startups founded long before the current AI boom. For example, Scale AI was founded in 2016, a time when the kind of deal Wang negotiated with Meta was incomprehensible to many. However, now, these potential outcomes can be taken into account in early term papers and “managed constructively,” Gazor explains.