Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made quite a stir in Silicon Valley as he created a new Superintelligence division within the company by bringing in talent from other AI giants like OpenAI, Google, and Apple. Zuckerberg reportedly lured many of these researchers and engineers with millions of dollars in packages and a personal meeting with him.
Just weeks after the creation of the new unit, however, much of the top talent is already leaving the company.
Among the people who have already left the company are Ethan Knight, a machine learning scientist who joined the company weeks ago. A former OpenAI researcher named Avi Verma went through the onboarding process but never showed up for his first day at Meta, according to a Financial Times report.
A research scientist named Rishabh Agarwal also announced his departure from the company, just 5 months after joining, in a post on X. Agarwal said that while the pitch from Zuckerberg and Meta Superintelligence chief Alexandr Wang “was incredibly compelling,” he ultimately “felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”
Some other long-time generative AI employees in the company like Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan, who had worked for 9 and 10 years respectively, have also decided to leave the tech giant.
ChatGPT co-creator wanted to leave Meta days after joining:
Meta shocked the world earlier in the year when it announced some of the high-profile OpenAI talent making its way to the company, and the most well-known face among them was ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao.
Just days after joining Meta, however, Zhao wanted to leave for his former employer, according to the Financial Times report.
In fact, Zhao had gone so far as to sign the employment paperwork to go back to OpenAI. The techie was then given the position of Meta’s Chief AI Scientist, a promotion that was personally announced by Zuckerberg in a post on Threads.
Why are AI researchers leaving Meta?
The FT report states that many of the new hires aren’t happy with Wang’s leadership style, who reportedly does not have previous experience in managing teams across a Big Tech company.
Meanwhile, yet other recruits have felt frustrated with the bureaucracy and the internal competition for resources like computing power within Meta.
