The founder of a company claims that his employees turned down contracts worth hundreds of millions offered by Mark Zuckerberg to go and work for him.

The Meta company, founded and led by Mark Zuckerberg, has put up hundreds of millions of dollars in offers to attract top researchers in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), but Benjamin Mann, one of the founders of the AI startup Anthropic, says that even astronomical contracts have not convinced his employees to go work for “Zuck,” according to Business Insider. Anthropic, says that even astronomical contracts have not convinced his employees to go and work for “Zuck,” reports Business Insider.
Although other AI startups have lost key team members to huge salary offers, Mann said in the latest episode of “Lenny’s Podcast,” published Sunday, that for Anthropic employees, the choice is not a difficult one.
“I think we’ve been maybe a little less affected than a lot of other companies in the space because the people here are very mission-driven,” he said. “They get these offers and then they say, ‘Well, of course I’m not leaving, because the best-case scenario at Meta is that we make money, and the best-case scenario at Anthropic is that we influence the future of humanity,’” Mann added.
His comments come as Anthropic has become one of the biggest players in artificial intelligence, despite the fact that it was created with the specific goal of developing AI in the safest possible conditions. Mann also said that he and other leaders left OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, in 2020 to found Anthropic because “safety was not a top priority there.”
A former OpenAI researcher told Fortune magazine last year that nearly half of OpenAI’s safety team had left the company.

The astronomical sums offered to top AI engineers.
Although Mann did not directly name the sums offered by Meta to the Anthropic employees it wanted to attract, the tech and business press has recently reported that in some cases they amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I’m pretty sure it’s real,” Mann said, referring to the $100 million signing bonuses Meta offered to engineers specializing in artificial intelligence.
“Paying individuals $100 million for a four-year package is actually quite cheap compared to the value they create for the business,” he said. “We are simply in an unprecedented period of growth, and things are only going to get crazier,” he added.

Source: hotnews.com

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