Right now, it’s almost next to impossible to determine the direction the AI landscape is going to take. This can be attributed to the technology’s ever-evolving nature, coupled with spontaneous roadblocks that hinder progress, including a lack of high-quality content to train advanced AI models.
But if the past few months are anything to go by, AI talent is increasingly becoming the most sought-after ingredient, which is potentially tied to the probability of top AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Google succeeding in the complex category.
Over the past few weeks, Meta has seemingly doubled down on its generative AI efforts, following Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to compete with rivals like OpenAI and Microsoft.
Perhaps more interestingly, Mets’s new AI lab predominantly comprises staffers poached from Anthropic and OpenAI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that Meta offered $100 million as a signing bonus to some of his staffers to get them to switch sides.
This was after the Facebook maker made a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI and even hired its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to lead its AI operations. While OpenAI claimed “none of its best people” to Meta’s offer, it forced its staffers to take a week-long vacation as it recalibrated its employees’ compensation packages in a bid to make them happier amid claims that they were pulling an 80-hour work week.
According to a leaked internal document, Microsoft has seemingly compiled a most-wanted list, comprising Meta engineers and researchers. Business Insider reports that the software giant has kicked off a new process, making competitive offers that potentially match Meta’s exorbitant compensation packages for its top talent.
Per Microsoft’s latest earnings report for the quarter ending June 30, 2025, the company’s revenue reached $76.4 billion, which was up 18% year-over-year, with a net income of $27.2 billion (up 24%). The report attributed the impressive gains that helped the software giant hit the coveted $4 trillion market capitalization threshold to its lucrative cloud and AI businesses.
As such, it seems extremely crucial for Microsoft to maintain and even improve its advances in the AI landscape to bolster its revenue and profit margins. But matching Meta’s compensation is no walk in the park.
But as it seems, Microsoft is pulling out all the stops, using people with intimate knowledge about the matter, indicating that the tech giant is making multi-billion-dollar offers to attract top AI talent from Meta to its camp.
The damning report further revealed that Microsoft’s AI division, spearheaded by former Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and CoreAI led by Meta’s former engineering lead Jay Parikh, has dedicated recruiting teams to help with the competitive offers.
Microsoft reportedly has a spreadsheet, including the name, location, and position of its most-wanted employees from Meta. Microsoft is seemingly more focused on poaching talent from Meta’s Reality Labs, GenAI Infrastructure, and Research divisions.
According to people with close affiliations with Microsoft, the software is using a new process for making compensation offers. Recruiters reportedly mark the most-wanted candidates as “critical AI talent” to attract the attention of the company’s top management for a swift response within 24 hours.
The recruitment and compensation process also includes an “offer rationale,” which features the potential candidate’s skillset and experience. Microsoft reportedly uses a “private compensation modeler” to determine the compensation offers it should make to these sought-after candidates.
This news comes amid massive layoffs that hit the Redmond giant, which left approximately 9,000 out of work. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, indicated that the issue has been weighing heavily on him, and while Microsoft is continuously thriving, turning into a $4 trillion company, its future seems highly uncertain, and more layoffs could be on the way.
