Why Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis calls Meta's AI poaching 'rational'

Demis Hassabis says Meta's aggressive AI hiring strategy is logical for a firm trailing in the race, but insists mission-not money-should drive cutting-edge AI work

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has called Meta’s poaching of AI talent from rival labs a “rational” strategy, stating that the Mark Zuckerberg-led company is trying to regain lost ground in the race to build frontier artificial intelligence.

 

Speaking on the Lex Fridman podcast, Hassabis said, “Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they'll manage to get back there. And it's probably rational, what they're doing from their perspective—because they're behind and they need to do something.”

 

Meta has been making waves in recent weeks with aggressive recruitment efforts, offering compensation packages reportedly as high as $200 million a year to top AI researchers.

 

 

Zuckerberg's talent push after Llama setbacks

 

Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, launched earlier this year, is being led by Scale AI’s former CEO Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The initiative follows lukewarm reception to the company’s Llama model releases in April.

 

Zuckerberg has reportedly taken a personal interest in the team-building process. Former OpenAI researchers Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Jiahui Yu, and Hongyu Ren are among those who have joined Meta in recent months.

 

‘There’s more important things than just money’

 

While Hassabis acknowledged the logic behind Meta’s strategy, he stressed that not all AI professionals are driven by financial rewards.

 

“There’s a strategy that Meta is taking right now… I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what it can do—and understand the consequences, both good and bad—are mostly doing it to be at the frontier, so they can help influence how that plays out and steward the technology safely into the world,” he said.

 

“There are more important things than just money. Of course, one has to pay people market rates—and those continue to go up,” he added.

 

How AI compensation has soared

 

According to recent federal visa filings reviewed by Business Insider, OpenAI’s technical staff earn an average of $292,115, with the top position drawing $530,000. Anthropic’s average for technical hires stands at $387,500, while Mira Murati’s new venture Thinking Machines Lab is reportedly offering salaries of up to $500,000.

 

Hassabis contrasted this with DeepMind’s early days: “I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn't even pay myself for a couple of years because there wasn't enough money. We couldn't raise any money. These days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round.”

 

Other AI leaders have echoed Hassabis’s views. “They get these offers and then they say, ‘Well, of course I’m not going to leave because my best-case scenario at Meta is that we make money, and my best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity',” said Anthropic Co-Founder Benjamin Mann.