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

• Meta lost three senior AI employees within a week after they announced their departures on X.
• The departures come as Big Tech firms battle for top AI talent with chunky pay packages.
• Elon Musk this week dubbed Silicon Valley's talent war as the "craziest" he's ever seen.

Meta has lost three top AI employees within a 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 Meta after more than seven years.

Erik Meijer, its senior director of engineering who had led the Instagram owner's 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 plans to "mess around doing independent research and see where it leads."

Research scientist Abhishek Das, who worked on Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, also departed, saying he's "excited to build something new."

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

Meta's even been offering jobs to researchers without first conducting interviews, per the report, amid a battle for workers with the right expertise offering big salaries, bonuses and equity.

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

Elon Musk hit out at OpenAI this week and said the ChatGPT maker has been "aggressively recruiting" Tesla engineers with big pay offers. He said he's 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 due to burnout or lack of faith in the company, The Wall Street Journal reported last June.

Prior to that, the 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.