Hayden Field

And the amount of defections, resignations, and other moves is only intensifying.

I feel like every week someone's doing a really high profile departure.

Sometimes it's every day in a week.

They always do a really dramatic announcement online, whether it's a resignation letter or...

just a thank you to like 20 different people that they worked with.

And then there's all the pay packages at stake here.

There's a lot of money at play, like, you know, reported billion-dollar pay packages for Meta.

Who knows how much is being offered to people at Anthropic, XAI right now.

Everyone just probably got rich from the SpaceX merger.

And also, they're all constantly being courted in the craziest ways, too, like Mark Zuckerberg making...

home-cooked soup personally for engineers he was trying to recruit, and Sam Altman personally calling potential recruits.

There's just a lot going on, and there's a lot of money changing hands.

But I do think it's important to remember that at some point, money doesn't really mean as much to a lot of these people as personal mission.

So that's what we're seeing.

A lot of people that are moving around right now from one job to another are doing it because a company no longer aligns with their personal mission or they no longer have faith in the leadership at that company.

So that's usually a lot of the motivation.

Yes, some people are leaving for like eye-popping pay packages, but I would say the majority of different...

job moves we're seeing right now in AI have to do with more interpersonal drama or personal belief statements and people trying to kind of go where their values align.

Yes.

You know, you would think not that much, but I will say I think that certain people have really outsized influence, and that's why certain people are seeing pay packages that reflect that.