Microsoft is Trying To Poach Meta AI Talent and Offering Multimillion-Dollar Pay Packages

Microsoft has compiled a spreadsheet of Meta AI employees by name, location and position as part of an aggressive recruiting push to sustain its AI-driven march toward a $4 trillion market valuation, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider. The company created a "critical AI talent" designation enabling top offers within 24 hours and mandated matching Meta's compensation packages, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says reach $100 million signing bonuses and recently hit $250 million total packages.

Microsoft AI under Mustafa Suleyman and CoreAI under ex-Meta engineering boss Jay Parikh have deployed special recruiting teams making multimillion-dollar offers with multimillion-dollar on-hire bonuses, while the company maintains flat headcount after cutting thousands of employees this year.

Not true

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen several of these offers, and the offers themselves are actually a mix of base pay rate at under market rates plus stock (lots of it to get to high numbers) but because of cultural defects at the company they want you to relocate and come into an office which is something I'm saying no to as I'm currently fully remote and making more money they are offering.

tldr; its mostly stock you have to pay taxes on and so the numbers are not as high as they are promoting and they honestly want to underpay for salary on top of the RTO bs. Microsoft is well known for trying to underpay and they have the lowest rates of all the tech companies, and that's reflected here.

Noncompete law and federal preemption

[hwstar]

This bidding war is bad, Very bad. California made noncompete employment agreements unlawful back in the late 19th century. If this talent bidding war continues, large corporations will lobby the federal government to preempt California's section 16600, and everyone will be bound be noncompete agreements nationwide.

Don't think the Democrats will filibuster a bill to do this in the Senate. Large donations by the tech companies to their re-election campaigns will see to it.

There is an escape clause in Califor

Re:

[ihavesaxwithcollies]

Not a lawyer. But noncompetes need to be made unlawful nationwide.

Not very smart, either, Corporate loving, bribe taking, dementia riddled mango mussolini is the new dictator in town. It's survival of the richest and you have no chance, bud.

I bet you miss Biden about now. No federal brownshirts running around with Biden.

Re:

[butlerm]

Contract law is a state matter, so I imagine it would be just short of impossible for the federal government to *preempt* state level restrictions on noncompete agreements especially when both parties are in the same state. However, employment law is already heavily constrained by federal law, and has been since the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930s. But there states still can and do enact higher standards and tighter restrictions, such as higher, state specific minimum wages requirements and restrict

Is MS making any real revenue on AI?

[Tablizer]

Yes, MS has a strong market-share, but mostly by subsidizing AI services to gain or keep market share. Subsidizing can't happen forever. I'm not convinced MS can find a significant proprietary advantage such that when the bubble pops, cheap and/or offshore startups will eat their share.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Problem is cost of entry. This requires hardware that is extremely expensive and very difficult to get even if you have the money.

This takes most of the "cheap and/or offshore startups" off the table as viable competitors.

Re:

[Tablizer]

It won't be expensive after the bubble pops.

Re:

[Luckyo]

I'm sure we'll be switching back from ICEs to horses any minute now.

Re:

[Tablizer]

I'm not saying AI will go away, only that the big tech co's may lose their grip on it.

Re:

[Luckyo]

Looking at the fact that even AMD and Intel are failing to get any meaningful inroads into AI chips so far, in spite of AMD having more experience in the field than Nvidia, and Intel... well, we don't talk about that Chinese hatchet man led company for a reason, who is out there to make hardware cheaper?

The market is so concentrated in Nvidia's hands at this point, that there's a boutique market of buying out used 4090s and new and used 5090s, doing a lot of manual soldering so that it has way more memory f

Re:

[rwrife]

Yes, there is direct revenue and indirect revenue from companies buying various MS AI services, it's quite popular in the enterprise market and slowly becoming an essential asset to companies and there isn't much competition (box.net maybe).

Re:

[Tablizer]

Is this similar to Oracle's forced bundling and license audit threat coercion to claim more cloud share than actual around 2018?

https://www.datacenterknowledg... [datacenterknowledge.com]