Nilay Patel

At the same time, the incentives of the AI companies themselves are going from raising money to making money.

Reporting suggests that OpenAI and maybe even Anthropic could go public this year, and doing so would create a historic amount of wealth.

It would also put new kinds of pressure on these companies to be more transparent about how they spend money and to be much more accountable for returning on the huge investments that they've raised so far.

There's a lot in this conversation.

The AI industry right now is full of drama.

There's big characters, bitter rivalries, lots of money, and really, really long blog posts about the end of the world.

Okay, here's Verge Senior AI Reporter Hayden Field.

Here we go.

I wanted to check in on the state of the tech labor market and how big of a distorting effect AI is having on it.

Not from the automation perspective, but rather how the behavior of the AI labs and the people who work there is having a major impact on everything around them.

People are leaving OpenAI for Anthropic or vice versa or going to some other lab or quitting to go live in the woods basically every week right now.

Usually it's someone high profile leaving the safety team or some other division of a big AI lab and then joining another one a few days later.

Sometimes they quit only to announce they've been poached a couple weeks later.

Sometimes they quit and say we're all going to die and that they're going to retire to Europe to write poetry, which we just saw with an Anthropic researcher who left the company this month saying, quote, the world is in peril.

That's just a little worrisome.

You follow this industry every day.

How would you characterize what's happening in the AI industry right now, just in terms of people getting new jobs and quitting their old jobs?

Can I ask a really rude question?

How much does any single AI researcher make or break any single AI company at this point?

When you say that people are leaving because of their personal mission,