Zoe Schiffer: And they do say right at the beginning the thing in cop shows where they're like, the body's been here for three days, and they were like, well, that's not real.
Leah Feiger: I loved that. Anything that tells me that Law & Order SVU is not in fact accurate is good by me.
Zoe Schiffer: We need that.
Leah Feiger: We definitely need that.
Zoe Schiffer: Coming up after the break, we dive into how some recently recruited AI researchers at Meta's Super Intelligence Labs are already packing their bags and leaving. Stay with us.
Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer. Here with me is our Senior Politics Editor, Leah Feiger. So our main story this week, our colleague Will Knight and I recently learned that at least three people who were recruited to Meta's Super Intelligence Labs have already resigned just two months after CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the initiative. But this is the kicker. Two of the staffers have recently returned to OpenAI where they previously worked and they had less than one month stints at Meta.
Leah Feiger: That's wild.
Zoe Schiffer: Meta obviously felt some type of way about the reporting.
Leah Feiger: Did you get yelled at?
Zoe Schiffer: I got yelled at. But I think their POV was, these people didn't last any length of time. What is this telling us? But in my mind, Mark Zuckerberg just went on this massive multi-billion dollar recruiting spree. He's giving people pay packages more often associated with professional sports stars. And the fact that some people are already leaving very, very shortly after starting that is just such a bad sign, I think. It's not to say that this lab couldn't be successful or they couldn't turn things around, but it just seems like there's a lot of chaos right from the beginning.
Leah Feiger: Well, you're being offered $100 million in a bonus. You get there. You don't even have time to bring in your favorite mug. I know there's incredible food at Meta. You can't even find your favorite cafeteria yet. A month is not enough time. What got them back to OpenAI, do you think?
Zoe Schiffer: So this is something that I'm still trying to figure out, because it didn't seem like from my reporting so far that Sam Altman just dangled an even bigger pay package. And Meta has deeper pockets. They can offer more money, which isn't to say that OpenAI isn't trying to compete on that front, but the whispers that I was hearing were more about mission alignment and leadership. You'll hear people say, well, Alexander Wang, who is the CEO of Scale AI, this very young founder, he's not technical, is what people will allege. He's not a hardcore researcher, and he's now leading Meta Superintelligence Labs. He was tapped earlier this summer to take on this really big role at Meta. Sam Altman's not a super technical researcher either, but he really has almost what I would say is a cult of personality around him at OpenAI. And Mira Murati had this too. Mira was the CTO, but she wasn't like Ilya. She wasn't a hardcore researcher in that way, but she was able to talk to researchers. They really felt understood by her. They trusted her. And so I think she too is able to get a lot of loyalty from the people she works with, even if she's, from what I hear, not paying the astronomical sums that Meta might be.