Top Meta engineers have joined xAI: CEO Elon Musk

Billionaire Elon Musk has finally waded into the ongoing AI talent battle initiated by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The competition for top talent has seen companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft losing key people, especially to Meta’s newly formed Superintelligence Labs.

Taking to X, Musk revealed that many former Meta engineers have joined his AI startup, xAI. However, he pointed out that unlike Meta, xAI isn’t offering “insane” pay packages.

“Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp (still great, but not unsustainably high),” Musk posted.



“Also, xAI has vastly more market cap growth potential than Meta,” he added.

Musk went on to describe his company as being “hyper merit-based” and said, “Do something great and your comp can shift substantially higher”.

On Sunday, Musk posted a shoutout to engineers, saying, “For ultra-hardcore engineers, @xAI is the place to be.”

Also Read: AI talent wars: Altman's OpenAI poaches top engineers from Musk, Zuckerberg firms

Meta responds

Musk isn’t alone in calling out Meta for its high compensation offers. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which has been Meta’s prime poaching target, has also made similar remarks on Zuckerberg’s aggressive hiring tactics, noting that some bonuses go up to $100 million.

However, the Meta founder has dismissed these claims, saying the numbers are “inaccurate”.

Speaking to investors, he explained, “We’re building an elite, talent-dense team. If you’re going to be spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computers and building out multiple gigawatts of clusters, then it really does make sense to compete super hard and do whatever it takes to get, you know, 50 or 70 or whatever it is, top researchers to build your team.”

Some of Meta's major hires in recent months include Daniel Gross (CEO of AI startup Safe Superintelligence), Ruoming Pang (leader of Apple’s Foundation Models team), and Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), along with several other top researchers from big and small companies.

Also Read: Top AI talent attracted not just by paycheques: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg