Meta loses top AI figures as Silicon Valley's talent battle continues

• Meta lost three senior AI employees last week, with each announcing their departure on X.
• The departures have come as Big Tech firms battle for top AI talent with chunky pay packages.

Meta lost three top artificial-intelligence employees last week amid Silicon Valley's ongoing battle for talent.

Devi Parikh, who was Meta's senior director of generative AI, said in an X post last week that she'd left the company after more than seven years.

Erik Meijer, the Instagram owner's senior director of engineering who had led its machine-learning research team Probability, also announced his departure.

He said on X: "Given the incredible competitive pressure in the field, there is really no advantage to be inside a large corp if you want to build cool stuff on top of LLMs."

Meijer added that he planned to "mess around doing independent research and see where it leads."

Abhishek Das, a research scientist who worked on Meta's team for Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR, also departed, saying on X that he was "excited to build something new."

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking matters into his own hands to fill the gaps. The Information reported that he'd been attempting to woo researchers from Google's DeepMind to join the company with personal emails.

The report said Meta had even been offering jobs to researchers without first conducting interviews amid a battle for skilled AI workers with big salaries, bonuses, and equity.

Zuhayeer Musa, a cofounder of salary-data site Levels.fyi, told The Wall Street Journal the median compensation package for a machine-learning and AI engineer at Meta was close to $400,000, citing data obtained from 344 people.

Elon Musk hit out at OpenAI this week and said the ChatGPT maker had been "aggressively recruiting" Tesla engineers with big pay offers. He said he was increasing the salaries of Tesla's AI-engineering team as a result.

"The talent war for AI is the craziest talent war I've ever seen!" Musk wrote on X.

The Meta departures follow an exodus of other AI employees in recent years. At least a third of Meta's researchers with published AI work left because of burnout or lack of faith in the company, the Journal reported last June.

Prior to that, a cofounder of Meta's AI lab, Rob Fergus, jumped ship in 2020 to join Google's DeepMind.

Meta didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.