YouSaid · the spoken record

Hayden Field

lines on the record: 46
first: 2025-07-31
most recent: 2025-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I can see that, like you said about individual people being stocks here, yeah. I mean, you know, they're going to see how that stock performs and then use that to inform future offers. So you're absolutely right.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm glad you brought that up, and that dynamic you just explained is why I kind of agree with you and I kind of don't. I think that There won't be as many people getting these kinds of numbers offers in the AI world, but I think the fewer people who are getting them will get more money because the leverage continues to grow per individual as AI starts to do more of the underlying work. So maybe it's like 50 people who are each getting $3 billion offers. That could honestly, people I've talked to say that is a feasible Future to imagine given the rate of change.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much can already replace an entry level engineer at their companies. The people that are going to be in demand are those that can shape and guide and deal with the big picture of these models rather than doing entry-level jobs to help train them and kind of deal with more of the minutiae. So it's going to be interesting to see the titles that are more in demand just kind of keep getting higher and higher rather than, yeah, those kind of entry level AI hires.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we're at Peak Hype, honestly. I think this is like a Hail Mary situation. They're doing all this. They're seeing if it pays off in a few years. And then after that, we see where it goes. I think it will not get bigger. It'll either stay the same or go lower. The other interesting thing to me is that I think as we see this industry progress and advance as quickly as it has been, The kind of amount of seniority you have to have in order to really be desirable is going to increase and increase. You know, we're already seeing open AI and anthropic talk about how their models are close to or”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Around people have seen different tech supercycles are all saying we've never seen anything like this. And I'm just wondering where it goes. And I think meta is a great kind of bellwether of, you know, they bring all these people in, they pay billions of dollars to assemble this elite team. If it doesn't work, what does that do to the industry? Right? Do you feel like there's room to run? Like these offers are going to get bigger or do you feel like we're kind of at peak hype here?”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, they are, they're bigger than athlete trades. They're bigger than any NBA superstar making a trade. And like the impact that these people can have is it's not as entertaining as watching a game, but it is bigger from an economic and tech perspective. So it is a new thing, though. I would say like this summer is the summer of AI researchers being talked about like superstar athletes. You're getting paid three to five hundred million dollars in a total package to join Meta. There are public companies. That's their annual revenue like Wix or Squarespace. So like you are a stock in that sense as an individual. I am wondering where all this goes. This feels like maybe peak AI talent bubble maybe not. You know, if AGI does happen, maybe it's not. But for right now, everyone I've talked to keeps saying people have been”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is also crazy to see TBPN announcing these researcher moves like their trades or huge athlete movers. I mean, we saw even, and I'm also wondering how these employees are dealing with the limelight, you know, I can't even imagine if I announced on LinkedIn I was moving to a new media startup, if all these like huge Twitter accounts are like, oh, Hayden Field's moving, like, what's she doing? And, you know, they're maybe not equipped to deal with this. Like two anthropic employees that were not even the top researchers of building Claude itself, but two leaders of the coding product, you know, left anthropic for a big signing bonus I hear at any sphere the developer of cursor, but then they came back two weeks later and it was all over Twitter, you know, every, you know, news account is tweeting about it like internal tech podcasts. And it's just interesting to see, yeah, these moves reported like, you know, big athlete trades.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we already covered how some of these numbers are maybe not as eye popping as they seem at first because there's a lot of caveats involved and there's really not that many of these top AI researchers in the world. But even with those disclaimers, I think it's still important to put something like 100 million per year offer in perspective because a number like that can just start to make your mind turn to mush, at least for me. Some of these key AI researchers are getting hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, often hundred million dollar signing bonuses, right? That is more money than the highest paid CEOs in the S&P 500, Apple CO Tim Cook. His pay last year was about $74 million. Satya Nadella at Microsoft's was about $79 million. And when you compare this to like the NBA, they're making more than Steph Curry, who's the highest paid athlete in the NBA. His total earnings were about $155 million.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who don't know Ilya was the co founder of OpenAI, the chief researcher, tried to fire Sam Altman, now has his own AI lab. It is pretty amazing. Zuck wanted to buy that whole lab. Ilya said no. Ilya is definitely in the post money category of AI minds. And instead, Zuck hired away his CEO and like savage, but it's, you're going to get who you're going to get. Let's end here by going back to where we started and this idea that bidding on top AI talent now looks something like the NBA transfer market.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a huge investment. And one that often will pay off depending on the right person. That's why they're being so choosy about who they get these big offers to, especially an investment. Like you said, that you can lock up like a target date fund. You're like, we're going to invest in this guy for four years at least, see what he gets as, and then reevaluate. And that's why I think there's still so much gossip and craziness around meta poaching Daniel Gross, the former CEO of Safe Superintelligence or SSI, Ilya's startup. Ilya then had to step in and become the CEO because, you know, that guy was leading one of the biggest dark horse new competitors in AI. And now he's at Meta. So they must have done the exact same thing, you know, just offered him something. He couldn't say no to, lock him.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Individual was possible, where if you invented a new transistor architecture, you could potentially create billions and billions of dollars in value. I think connected the two. And for me, that makes a lot of sense. You know, if you come up with a new scaling paradigm for one of these models that leads to meta having to spend billions of dollars less on its data centers to run inference for its model, you've paid for yourself potentially 10x, even if you're making a billion a year.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can lock up a considerable amount of talent, right? Like the new chief scientist for his lab was the co creator of ChatGPT and GPT-4, right? If you can lock that guy up for four plus years with a compensation package that can't really be matched by anyone that has aggressive clawbacks that is performance-based, you're taking players off the market, right? You're taking athletes off the field, so to speak. It's a defensive move as much as it's an offensive move. I was talking to an AI exec at Databricks late last year, Niveen Rale, who is always, I think, really pressured on this stuff. And he was telling me something really interesting. He said that the leverage that a researcher has in an organization is unprecedented. One researcher's ideas can completely change the product. That's kind of new. And he compared it to semiconductors, and that being the last area of tech where this kind of leverage from a specific”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, that's true because, I mean, people get frustrated when those types of resources are diverted away from their team. There's infighting in that regard. We saw that at OpenAI. When you're promised a certain amount of compute and then you're deprioritized, that can lead to leaving. There's also, yeah, a lot of disagreements when you're at a startup that doesn't have access to a lot of compute and you feel like you can't build what you're trying to build or you can't do the job you were hired for. They're all trying dust related to kind of hold on to who they have and just kind of give them more compute, give them more money, whatever they can do to, you know, keep their talent in-house.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's another aspect of this too where the AI researchers are probably the hottest commodity in AI, but I think a close second is GPUs. A big pitch that these labs make to potential recruits is your access to GPUs and that access being guaranteed. OpenAI has been public about needing to divert GPU allocation away from research to product because ChatGPT has just gone parabolic with its growth. So if you're a leading researcher, what really motivates you is pushing the frontier, achieving AGI, and really pushing forward these benchmarks, you need those GPUs. And if someone like Zuck can say, look, I'm building a data center the size of Manhattan. I'm going to guarantee you more GPUs than you can be guaranteed anywhere else. That's a huge draw is what I've heard, because it's basically the GPUs are the fuel for the work, right? And I don't think that gets talked about.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Crazy. They expect so many personal sacrifices, whether on like your value systems or work life balance. He said you're expected to give pretty much your whole self to meta AI, which is true for a lot of firms, but personal relationships go a long way here, whether you're trying to get someone over to your company or whether you're not responding to an offer. Even at Anthropic, you know, they have a couple teams where the people have worked together for years and years. Some of them have gone to college together. There's a lot of like inside baseball here and kind of hiring your friends and people you admire that you've known for a really long time. So yeah, definitely is a small world.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other thing I think is funny is that it's such a small world in this industry. A lot of people have worked together. And if you haven't worked with someone, you know someone who has. So it's very gossipy. You know, like you said, that guy said, I wouldn't work for Zuckerberg. There is a lot of other people that have said to me, you know, I couldn't take this meta offer. I couldn't even respond because I have friends that work there and their lives are.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the person I talked to who didn't respond to a Zuck reach out basically was like, I just, I can't work for that guy, which, you know, yeah, people, these CEOs, especially these founders like him and Elon, are very polarizing. And if you have the pick of wherever you want to work and you can name your price, you can afford to have it be a principled, I guess, decision in that way. That makes sense to me.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lines with them on whatever those views are. So, yeah, we're seeing people turn down crazy offers, personal reachouts from execs. You know, I've heard OpenAI CEO Sam Altman always calls at least most technical hires, potential hires with an offer, you know, to personally pitch them. These people know how in demand their work is, you know, because like you said, you know, there's maybe less than 2,000 people that can do what they're doing right now and pushing the industry forward. So they really care about how their stuff's being used, who they're doing it with, what their work-life balance is, maybe not so much the work-life balance because they're all working a lot, but at least what their work culture is, you know, how happy they are day to day and how much they believe in what they're doing. So that's what I've thought is really interesting. Some of these people won't even consider an offer if they're already pretty aligned with their current workplace and, you know, not much could get them to leave.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, something that I've seen is pretty constant over the last few years in AI reporting, but is more evident now than ever, is that a lot of these key AI engineers or researchers are what you might call post-money. Like they make so much that making more isn't in and of itself a motivator for them. Yes, they're motivated by money, but after a certain point, you know, it's kind of all fake. You know, you're making millions. Okay, what's another few million? So they care a lot about how their work is being used, who they're doing it with, who they're doing it for, what their company's vision is in terms of accelerationism, you know, societal impact, safety, risk. A lot of them have differing views on that stuff, but it's important to a lot of them that their company or the leader of the team they work on.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would say, What in the world are you thinking? I talked to someone who got a personal reach out from Zuck and didn't respond, which I was like props. What motivates these researchers besides money? I do think more are motivated by money than they want to let on. I think when you get to these kinds of numbers, it's impossible to not be. But at the same time, like someone just not responding to a Zuck reach out, I think says a lot about the industry and the way that these researchers are motivated. What have you learned about that?”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to take another short break here. We'll be back in just a minute. Welcome back. Hayden and I are talking about the hot market for top AI researchers right now. Before the break, we were chatting about some of the incredibly lucrative cash offers folks are getting from the biggest companies. But at a certain point, maybe money really isn't everything. You and I have both talked to”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Especially when the competition is so steep, like you said. I mean, you know, everything OpenAI does anthropic and now even XAI are immediately following. You know, they released a government product, Anthropic and XAI both released a government product, you know. Coding help, enterprise. Those are their biggest money makers. And now that market is being like, you know, cut in three instead of them just cornering it. So it's definitely interesting to see, yeah, I don't think that they have as much runways they did before in terms of the runway to growth and tripling that type of valuation.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you're a leading AI researcher and you're evaluating a really big offer from Meta, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, but it's heavily tied to performance, right? And you're thinking about the upside to that offer, what are the odds that Meta adds another trillion in market cap versus anthropic tripling its valuation in the next 18 months? It's probably more likely that Anthropics going to go way up faster because anthropics just starting from a much smaller valuation. It's still huge, obviously, but it's small and relation to big tech.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. They have built their reputation on caring a little bit more about safety. As we've seen, people disagree on how different their mission really is from open AIs. Over the years, it seems to be getting closer and closer. But either way, people who work there really feel that their voice is heard about safety stuff. Top AI researchers really care about safety and they really care about how their work is being used. So, you know, whether it's making it up the chain or not, the fact that they feel they can talk about it, their voices are being heard. I think is leading to less turnover. And that's what I've seen. I mean, I was looking at a recent report of employee turnover at AI firms, and Anthropics was very, very low compared to open AIs and even deep mines. So I think they are set up pretty well to keep most of their talent for now. They also reportedly just got a way higher valuation, nearly three times their valuation march. So, you know, people are making money. They feel like their voice is heard, at least for now.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's available in the market, but I've heard that there are deep mind org is not really getting into bidding wars with Zuck, like some of the other labs like OpenAI, where a senior researcher compared it to a home invasion, what Meta was doing. Google is, I think, their bench of talent is so deep. And Gemini is considered to be such a good model right now that they feel like they can afford to lose people if need be. And they don't want to get into these crazy bidding wars. So that's been an interesting thing. I've just observed about Google recently. I'm curious, especially, I think you've been reporting more on anthropic recently, which is another huge nucleus of talent that so far seems to be withstanding Zuck's poaching more than OpenAI and others. Is that another one that we think is in a relatively good spot from a talent perspective anthropic?”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Startup is left to pick up the pieces, and in many cases, they can't. And again, this is like this is a brazen middle finger to regulators, like scale is a great example. My understanding of the scale deal and why it happens so fast and was structured that way is Zuck wanted Alexander Wang in the office immediately. And he was in the office within a few days of that deal being announced working on setting up Meadow's new lab. There's an expediency to how these deals work where the acquirer can get the people in its tent ASAP. And because the IRA race is so red hot and everyday counts for who is going to have the best model, who is going to be at the frontier, that speed really matters. What's interesting with Google though, Google feels like it's in a pretty good spot. I think Google's feeling, you know, they can come in and do the reverse aquaire with Windsurf when they want some talent.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To my knowledge, I don't think any of these startups that have been reverse aqua hired so far are doing objectively better than they were before. Big tech came in and stole the founding team. Character AI is a great example. It was a pretty viral chatbot kind of companion platform created by two early Google senior engineers and since those guys went back to Google, you don't really hear about character as much. Scale, which Zuck just hired the CEO and some of the core team from Meta AI's new lab just did layoffs, you know, Windsurf had to sell itself like within days from Google sweeping in. So yeah, there's this, I think, interesting second order effect where big tech is coming into these often really well funded, well positioned startups that are really red hot, they take the team and then the”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was some confusion on whether he accepted the offer from Google or whether he turned it down. But either way he ended up at cognition. So yeah, we are seeing people jump ship when things like this happen to them, when they are left with a shell company. We're seeing some of them kind of ride the ship down and say, you know what, I'm going to see what happens. I still care about some of the people here. Scale is going through the same thing. You know, after the big deal we saw. So it's kind of a new thing for these AI industry people to be contending with because it's not something that has happened in their industry before.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting because AI engineers, AI researchers, anyone in that industry has a sense of loyalty a lot of the time to where they work. You know, sometimes they'll stay somewhere for their whole career so far, or they've known the founders for a long, long time. And that's part of why they took a job. So, yeah, there's definitely a sense of rejection or sometimes betrayal when things like this happen and you're left at your shell company and the person you got to that company to work for maybe one of the main reasons you made that decision is suddenly gone. We saw one engineer who said he was employee number two at Windsurf go viral on X for saying he got an offer from Google that exploded within a day according to some of the replies including people from Y Company or it may have been a $20 million offer as part of a buyout you know he said he forfeited his vested shares he ended up going to cognition instead”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It started with inflection and Microsoft. Microsoft hired away the CEO of inflection to run its AI group. And Google just said it with Windsurf. I'm curious with these reverse aqua hires that are happening, Windsurf and Google being the latest example, how does this impact the people on the ground at these startups, the people who either decide to go or don't or get left behind without a choice? How does it affect them and then just the broader ecosystem? Because this is a new thing that's starting to happen in Silicon Valley.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find them that home. And in the Google case, this wasn't an acquisition, but I think we should call it what it is. This is Google avoiding antitrust scrutiny. Years ago, they would have just acquired all of Winsurf and not used the parts of the company that they didn't want. Big tech can no longer make these kind of acquisitions for the most part. And so Google came in and said, we'll take the best people for us. We'll pay you a quote-unquote licensing fee, which is really just money that then pays back the shareholders as if it was an acquisition that can also be used to pay back employee stock as if they were getting their company sold. And what's left is, like you said, this shell of a company without its, you know, beating heart, so to speak, the people that build the AI models and the AI technology to then scramble and pick up the pieces. This is actually a pattern that's been playing out reverse aqua hires.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's unpack that a little more. So Windsurf is one of the hottest AI coding startups. They were going to sell to OpenAI. That deal fell apart. And then, like you said, the kind of like a soap opera. The team gathers and finds out that Google is actually hiring away the CEO and the core AI engineering team. So 40-ish people, the company's like 250, 300 people. These people are already leaving. They're already out the door and there's a new CEO and you all figure it out. And then over that weekend, Windsurf sells the rest of itself to another AI coding startup called Cognition. This happened in a period of like two days over a weekend. And that shows, I think, how sought after these people are that are building these leading AI startups, that the moment there's a flare set up, that there is a group of people looking for a home, someone will swoop in and immediately.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We saw OpenAI's deal to buy Windsurf that had been really reported over months and months suddenly off and instead Google swooped in and hired the CEO, the co-founder, and a lot of their R&D employees and just brought them onto the Google DeepMind team to build agents. So they're going to be working on Gemini. Google's not going to have a stake in Windserf or control, but it's going to take a non-exclusive license to some of Winserf's tech. So it's been pretty crazy. Their head of business became their interim CEO. They had to suddenly name a new president. And a lot of the employees were kind of shocked by this because they had been pretty close for a long time. It had been a team that had known each other for a while. It was a perfect example of how soap opera-esque, these hiring wars are starting to become. You know, when you're at a company and you've been there for a while, maybe you're employee number one, employee number two, you see on Twitter that most of your company, the talent of your company.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome back. This is Alex Heath talking with the Virgil's Senior AI reporter Hayden Field about the big talent wars bursting out all over the AI scene. Many of these companies are spending absolutely ridiculous amounts of money to hire top talent outright, but that's not the only way they're poaching folks. Big Tech has gotten its way through acquisitions for a long time. But now there's something else happening, where companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon aren't buying up whole startups. They're just buying the parts they want. Move on to another aspect of the talent wars, which is all of these interesting acquisitions that are happening and their acquisitions in a different way. Recently, you had a great scoop for us here at the Verge about Google sweeping in to steal away a team of a very hot AI startup. Talk about that.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and delivering for a company like Meta is realistically adding trillions of dollars in market cap. It's getting to superintelligence, whatever that means. I'm not sure the industry actually knows what that means, but building this kind of all-seeing, all-powerful AI and making meta the undisputed winner in the consumer AI race, which means when you think of AI and interacting with it, you don't think of ChatGPT, you think of meta. That's going to be a very hard goal to crack.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And there's also a lot of boomerang and bouncing around. Like I was talking to an AI consultant and he knew someone hired for, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars as a growth executive at an AI firm, so not a researcher, not an engineer, but got flown to an international off-site. And then he was cut two months later due to lack of sales. So those performance metrics affect everyone, but they obviously uniquely affect those people that are getting those huge signing bonuses. And, you know, it's going to cut you back a lot if you don't deliver.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Important to distinguish the researchers from the engine. So it's more complex than it's made out to be. And I think in that context, the offers and the numbers are not as crazy. They're still crazy, I think, to anyone who's not in the AI world, but they're not as crazy.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Some of them are tied to specific performance metrics that may be a little bit vague or maybe decided upon by the people above you. That's what I'm hearing at least from people that have turned down these offers. weren't fully sure on what it would really entail. And so, you know, they would rather just stay where they know what's what.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Viral products that we all know have been getting these crazy offers. AI researchers specifically, not just engineers, it's specifically researchers are mostly getting these crazy offers. Yeah, as you brought up buyouts and performance metrics are a big part of this too. There's a lot of unseen kind of caveats in these offers. So it depends on your performance, how long you stay, and some of them are pretty subjective. So I think that's the interesting kind of side part of the story here.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a great point about Zuck wanting to avoid being embarrassed. I think he already put so much into the metaverse stuff. He was like, I can't lose on AI too. But when I first saw these headlines coming out, I was thinking, I wasn't surprised in some ways because there's so much money flowing in the industry right now, whether you're pre-profit, pre product, pre-everything right now, that it didn't surprise me that some of the biggest movers and shakers, the biggest builders in this space are getting recruited this hard. What I was interested in is how many people are really getting these crazy offers versus how many are just getting normal offers normal for the AI industry is still obviously really high, but nowhere near these, you know, crazy numbers that we saw from a select few. So yeah, when I did some digging, I saw all is not really what it seems here. Only the real top grass, the top AI researchers that have built, you know, the”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To happen. So he's going out and canvassing and has basically hit up every hot AI startup and respected AI researcher you could think of, finally assembled a team. And yeah, I would be curious, Hayden, when you saw these headlines first coming out about meta, what was your reaction?”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amounts that surpass what the highest paid CEOs on the SP five hundred make. And I mean, it's obvious if you follow this that Meta is behind in AI, Llama 3 was a good model, was well received, and then Llama 4 earlier this year was not. And actually, internally, what I heard was that Lama 4 in the user's eyes was worse than Lama 3. And it actually hurt the engagement for Meta AI, which is Zuckerberg's would-be chat GPT killer. And considering that everything is AI these days and that the stock value of these trillion dollar companies is tied to their AI initiatives, that's not good. And if you're behind on the model race, you're behind on potentially winning AGI superintelligence, whatever you want to call it, and Zuck was obviously not wanting that.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both been talking to sources around the AI industry for the last month or so about this talent war that's going on, these crazy offers that researchers are getting. People have seen this mostly as it pertains to meta and the 100 plus million dollar offers that Mark Zuckerberg's been making. But there's actually a lot more going on underneath the surface. And it gets to that power dynamic that you just talked about, the amount of money is eye-popping and hard to make sense of if you're not in the industry. So we're going to talk about all of these key things. I think I would like to start though with meta just because it is the way that people have seen the talent wars manifested in the last month or so, what Zuckerberg has been doing. I think it's important really to step back and think about like why is meta doing this specifically and why are they being so aggressive with going out and trying to hire people and spend”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“thing. I think the most interesting part Be it to me is the power dynamics involved and the societal implications. It's crazy how much money is at play here in the hands of so few people leading the charge. And the fact that this is one of the only industries now where you can get a ton of funding, a ton of buy-in without even having a product yet. So I would say, you know, interesting things about bias in systems, ways they're affecting our everyday lives right now that maybe the public should know about and just crazy stuff about the power dynamics involved, whether it's the executives and how they handle their power and the way that they advance these systems forward with or without the opinions of the people building them, their employees, and also just kind of the societal implications and how this is starting to affect everyone's everyday life when a few years ago it maybe wasn't.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's a whole lot more to this story. Hayden and I have been reporting on this for the past several weeks to get a sense of how big some of these offers really are, why companies like Google are opting to hire instead of acquire, and what it means that some of the most sought after AI experts in the world are no longer motivated by money alone. So good to have you on the show, your first Dakota appearance. Welcome. Thanks. I'm so excited and honored, especially to be talking about this. It's just crazy out there right now. It is crazy out there for sure. Before we jump into this, Hayden, since you've only been at the Verge for, gosh, what is it, a couple months now? Talk a little bit about your beat. What are you focusing on and what are you excited about? What should people be reaching out to you about?”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. Today I'm joined by Hayden Field, the Verge's new senior AI reporter. We're going to talk about the AI talent wars and why some researchers are suddenly getting traded like their NBA superstars. If you've been paying attention at all to the AI industry this past month, you've likely seen stories about the hiring frenzy that's been happening between big tech, research labs, and AI startups. Leading the charge here has been Mark Zuckerberg, who has been making some truly unprecedented job offers to try and lure top AI talent to meta.”
2025-07-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Why AI researchers are getting paid like NBA All-Stars · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT