Money no longer matters to AI's top talent

17:49Hayden Field:we're back with verge senior ai reporter hayden field talking about the wild state of the ai talent war let me connect this to xai which has no trust and safety concerns whatsoever as we have covered in great detail on the verge and on decoder at a high level what's happening with xai Grok and Elon. Like he's merged XAI and with it, the X platform into SpaceX. I think it's very important for us to all take a beat and note that SpaceX now operates Twitter, which is weird, but a lot of people got paid. A bunch of people left. There's some chaos and drama with them leaving. What's going on there?

18:26Nilay Patel:Yeah, that's so true. I mean, it feels like we went through a wormhole yet again. It's just crazy that SpaceX is operating Twitter. But yes, XAI has pretty much earned a reputation for being a place that doesn't abide by industry standard safety guidelines, which are already arguably maybe lower than they should be to begin with, and doesn't even abide by those. And it's also earned a reputation as a place where people mostly do whatever Elon wants in order to be successful. Sources have told me that, that that's kind of the way you survive at XAI is do what Elon wants and just kind of like keep your mouth shut and go quickly.

19:02Nilay Patel:So that's led to some really disastrous consequences that have left a chunk of its workforce pretty dissatisfied with working there and ready and willing to jump ship. Or if they do get fired via restructuring or laid off, they're not that upset about it. And they're kind of like, yeah, this is kind of a shit show. Pardon my French. So I think that the restructuring was also related to some of these things. I was hearing that Elon was pretty frustrated with the pace the company was moving at, even though a lot of people said it was going too fast in a lot of areas, like safety and too slow in other areas.

19:37Nilay Patel:They were always playing catch-up and trying to just do exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic were doing instead of charting its own course, according to some sources I spoke with. So yeah, I think that Elon wants to be the premier frontier lab company doing exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing, working with the government, enterprises, and consumers. But he wants to do it in an edgier way while still being brand safe, which is a recent focus for him, it seems like.

20:02Hayden Field:Let me push on that just a little bit. There's the trust and safety part, which, you know, Grok, I think, should not have been undressing people all over the X platform or really on any platform. But they allowed it to do that. And it feels like most image generators could do that. And the safety guardrails were just built in at the beginning. And Grok's innovation was not having the safety guardrails at all. So you could do bad things with it. But the innovation that's driving all the money and the employee movement is, hey, look at this thing that an AI model can do. Look at what Cloud Code can do.

20:36Hayden Field:Look at what OpenClaw can do. If we use the models in different ways or we orchestrate them in different ways, these things can go be more agentic. They can accomplish more tasks. And I don't see any of that from XAI. It doesn't seem like Elon has a particular thesis of what XAI should be doing or what Grok should be doing besides being like your sexy girlfriend. Is there any thesis that anybody has identified?

21:04Nilay Patel:No. I mean, that's exactly what sources were telling me. They were like, yeah, basically his thesis is, oh, I see that OpenAI or Anthropic did this. Okay, let's do it too. But it's hard to get better at something that someone else is already really good at, especially if you're not doing anything differently. You're just trying to chart the exact same course and catch up. So that's what a lot of sources were telling me that led to frustrations within the company, that it was like a lot of catch up, a lot of like pressure to work at breakneck speed. But even then they weren't catching up. And then the only things they were like known for as being different were like embarrassing porn stuff.

21:40Nilay Patel:So, yeah.

21:41Hayden Field:You know, Elon and XAI get a lot of credit for just standing up a frontier AI company and catching up as much as they did. Like, very few other companies have been able to do that. Right. I always attributed that to, well, what you needed was a lot of compute and Elon has a lot of money, so he just bought a lot of GPUs. And then he stole the internet like everybody else did. And he trained a model using the technology everyone else trained. And now he has Crock, which is about as good as GPT-5, which is about as good as Gemini. And that's the state of the art. It sounds like you're saying there's actually a lot more differentiation at that frontier model level now.

22:17Hayden Field:And just having a whole bunch of GPUs trading away is not enough.

22:21Nilay Patel:Basically, all of these companies are leapfrogging each other every week when it comes to which is better at what. So, you know, Cloud Code was having a moment for months. Now some people are saying OpenAI's new model is actually better at coding. I mean, obviously engineers love to do and work with whatever model is the best that week. They can easily switch around. That's something they've always done and probably will always do. But what I'm seeing for the first time now is that some people are going off of like loyalty more when they stay with a model or like just knowing kind of the tone or like liking what they've built up with that model, the rapport, the instructions that they've like laid into it via, you know, special docs and stuff.

23:05Nilay Patel:I saw that even when OpenAI was like beating Anthropic on some coding benchmarks, a lot of people were like, oh, well, I still like working with Cloud Code, so I'm just going to keep doing that. And same with vice versa. Some people, when Anthropic seemed to be winning the coding wars, some people wanted to stick with OpenAI because they were like, I just like this model better. And I'm sure a lot of people feel that way about, you know, some aspects of Grok too. Like maybe they just like the tone. They just like this or that. So they're just sticking with it. So I think it's like I'm seeing more loyalty with the users in a way I hadn't really seen before.

23:38Nilay Patel:I think every company, including XAI, is trying to create like a moat that will keep people in their ecosystem. Because, I mean, that's the only way to really eventually make money.

23:48Hayden Field:The idea that the models themselves are kind of all interchangeable and you've got to build other kinds of moats, whether it's the personality of the model or specific feature sets or in the case of Grok, porn. that to me connects very directly to, well, a bunch of researchers can just leave, right? If the underlying models are as similar as you're saying, and it's the other motes on top, well, that to me is why you would say, well, I have enough money. I want to go someplace where the mission matters. And there's a lot of reasons why the missions at XAI might be different than your perceived mission at OpenAI versus your perceived mission at Anthropic.

24:28Hayden Field:If you've been paying attention, you've seen a huge wave of coverage about Anthropic in various publications lately. The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Verge. And there's a theme in all of those stories. It really feels like Anthropic thinks Claude might be alive, and that it needs to take AI ethics and morality very seriously. A number of those pieces, including our own, featured interviews with Amanda Askell, the resident philosopher at Anthropic who's working on safety. It seems like Anthropic is pushing very hard to maintain its reputation as the AI safety-first land.

25:00Do you think hinting that Claude is alive is like a competitive advantage for Anthropic?

25:06Hayden Field:Are they just doing it to hype themselves up and court talent?

25:10Nilay Patel:Well, they are really on a tear right now. I recently wrote that story about how big of a moment Claude is having between the success of Claude Code and Anthropic's safety reputation. And also there's Super Bowl ads, which we're throwing shade at OpenAI for having ads in the chatbot. But I asked Amanda Askella about this actually when I last spoke with her about what responsibility Anthropic has to feed into or not feed into that narrative about Claude's potential consciousness. Because I thought it was interesting that Anthropic didn't just outright deny it. They've been towing the line of, oh, we don't know.

25:47Nilay Patel:It depends on how you define consciousness. It may not be the same as human consciousness, but that doesn't mean it's not conscious at all. Basically, they're giving the vibe of like, Claude is a secret third thing. Like, it's not human. So, yeah, it's interesting they're being very vague. And I asked her about this. I said, like, you know, do you not think you have a responsibility to people to, you know, really give an answer one way or the other or to say, you know, it's not sentient? And she told me that people wouldn't really take Anthropics stance seriously if they did just outright deny it, that it wouldn't really, you know, inspire a lot of confidence in them being thorough.

26:27They're still riding on this reputation of being safety first and transparent and forthcoming about, like, you know, what Claude is and the risks of AI and the work they're doing to try and mitigate that.

26:37Nilay Patel:But I think the main reason they're doing all that or a main reason is because it's good for business. Like whenever I talk to CEOs and tech leaders, a lot of them say they're less worried about brand safety and fallout from Anthropic because of its reputation. And, you know, they're using that to recruit people. They're using that to work with a lot of big enterprises that are worried about data privacy and, you know, brand risk and advertising. And they're also using it to work with the U.S. government. They have a lot riding in terms of money on their reputation for being safe.

27:05Hayden Field:I feel like Sam Altman spent weeks, months saying AGI was imminent and he stopped doing that because he has to run a consumer business that is going to make money in ads now. And he can't run around saying that he's invented digital god the way that he was like earlier last year maybe. Anthropic was way quieter about it. I know Dario won't even say AGI. But they are much louder about, hey, we think it's alive. Like he literally is in the times. Dario is in the times saying, I don't know what kind of consciousness it is. I can't quite describe it. Like he's – they're right up on that line. You know, the AI field is full of true believers.

27:39Hayden Field:It's full of people who think they can really push the boundaries of consciousness with computers. Is it like having an impact on this market that companies like OpenAI and Google are so nakedly commercial in the way that like consumer product companies have to be commercial? Like they're just doing ads. They're trying to get you to buy shoes. Anthropic is an enterprise company, so you don't see the commercial side of their business quite as much. and so they can kind of hint that they think they're on the verge of the next stage of evolution.

28:07Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, I think that it's definitely feeding into the hype. I also think it's probably going to have some adverse effects on the population that believes Claude is conscious like a human. I think that it's not helping to, you know, kind of vaguely answer these questions and not really give a lot of detail. We just saw a lot of people that were very upset about OpenAI shutting down 4.0, a model that a lot of people were really emotionally attached to. We're in this strange era where AI companies are the authority on what their models are. And Anthropix over here is saying, we don't really know what Claude is.

28:52Nilay Patel:And I don't know if that's an example of transparency or if it is something that they'll come to regret. It just reminds me of the times that tech CEOs have said, oh, like, I'm so worried about what I'm building. It's too powerful. Hold me back. It's another example of the move fast and break things approach, I think, in a way, because if you're not quite sure what you're building, should you be building it? We'll see.

29:20Hayden Field:we have to take another quick break we'll be back in just a minute

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31:54Nilay Patel:This episode is brought to you by Nespresso. Introducing Virtual Up, the latest in a long line of innovation from Nespresso. It's innovation you can touch, sense, and taste in every single cup. With a three-second start, easy open lever, and dedicated brew-over-ice button, it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way. Sip for yourself. Shop Virtuo up exclusively at Nespresso.com. Hey guys, it's me, Tuffy, the host of Tuffy Talks. On this week's episode, we're doing a State of the Union, but more state of pop culture, 2026, from Ozempic to Tradwives. Spooky. And why the center of pop culture is in Utah now?

32:38Nilay Patel:We do a deep dive on Chloe and Lamar. We talk Hilary Duff. You know what? Find us everywhere at Teffy Talks. Subscribe on YouTube and all the podcast platforms and Instagram and TikTok so you can share with your other work bestie and hopefully everyone you've ever met.

33:04Hayden Field:We're back with Verge senior reporter Hayden Field. There's a bigger picture here as well. These companies have grown so big, with valuations so extraordinary, on top of plans to go public, that we're about to see a historic level of wealth generation for people in the AI industry. That's not to say that any of these big AI firms are suddenly on the cusp of generating so much revenue that investors are going to get an actual return on their investment. Big tech is set to spend almost a trillion dollars in CapEx this year, with nowhere near the revenue levels that would make a return on that anytime soon.

33:36Hayden Field:This goes beyond, say, the last explosion of companies going public. Facebook went public in the early 2010s. Lots of millionaires were made. Generationally important companies went public. But this is like a different level. It's a different category of numbers even in terms of investment in and expected return out in these IPOs. What are the timelines for OpenAI and Anthropic to go public? Because they're raising a lot of money. They're talking about a lot of money. But at some point, they're going to have to go public and return all that money, right?

34:06Nilay Patel:Exactly. This is going to be a really big year for them kind of having to meet the pressure that's been rising on how they're going to make money. And it's going to be interesting to kind of see them sweat. Because we know OpenAI wants to go public this year, and some reporting suggests it could be Q4. Anthropic could also IPO this year. So going public would obviously supercharge their funding and change the AI industry a lot. But they really, really, really need money right now. They're going to be beholden to shareholders in a new way. They're going to have to be transparent about certain things for the first time.

34:40Nilay Patel:But the other interesting part of all this to me is just the fact that the CEOs and the executives at these companies have been acting so differently in the past year than they have in the past. I remember Sam Allman used to often say, I'm not really worried about how OpenAI is going to make money. It's going to. He would really make it a point to highlight that he was not worried about generating a profit. Now that is completely flipped. Last time I saw him in October, he was visibly worried about how the company was going to make money. He seemed nervous. He mentioned multiple times, oh, we've got to make money.

35:17Nilay Patel:We've got to turn a profit. You know, it could look like X, Y, or Z, but we've got to do it. So I've never seen him so nervous about money. And I think that we're going to see that reflected in this year when they IPO and when they're going to have to answer to shareholders in a new way.

35:32Hayden Field:Is that push for commercialization to make money and be an actual business instead of a research lab? Is that what's pushing people to quit?

35:41Nilay Patel:I think so, for sure. I mean—

35:43Hayden Field:You've got to work for a bunch of meta-executives who work at OpenAI now to push ads on people?

35:48Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, a lot of engineers and researchers get really, you know, disillusioned when they think they're going to be doing one thing and they're doing another. You know, we saw someone quit at OpenAI because of the ad stuff. We saw someone else quit because of the, you know, potential NSFW, like, sexting stuff. We saw people leave XAI over the Grok NSFW stuff. When you are tasked with building something that doesn't align with your values, maybe you went to a company because you thought you were going to help achieve AGI, or maybe you thought that you were going to be like, you know, curing cancer, making the world a better place, pick your reason out of a hat here.

36:27Nilay Patel:and then you're tasked with creating something super commercial, short-term, and kind of in your eyes, dumb, yeah, you're going to be pretty upset and you're probably going to leave. Because, again, even if your pay package is tied to a lot of long-term stuff that you're going to do at the company or it's tied to the number of years that you're going to stay there in terms of vesting, sometimes you don't care. Again, a lot of these people are post-money, so they have enough money. It's just about whether they believe in what they're doing day to day. And if you're doing something you don't agree with or that you think is stupid, yeah, you're going to leave.

37:03Hayden Field:You know, when companies go public, they have to start delivering quarterly earnings. Their CEOs have to do investor calls. Things get very regular and standardized and, quite honestly, much more boring. That is not a great environment to, like, suddenly start writing huge checks to random researchers because you want to lure them from meta to make AGI. Do you think the process of going public or becoming more responsible companies or even just having to make money will bring some of the froth in this market down?

37:34Nilay Patel:Definitely, yes, because there's going to be more transparency, so they're going to have to answer for more of their decisions. I think they can still write a few huge checks, but they're going to have to really back it up. So, you know, like we talked about earlier, there's a handful of people at each of these companies that are really driving a ton of change and they have a lot of influence and they're doing a lot more ideation than anyone else. So people like that, that they can really back up that check for, yeah. But they can't just be doing it left and right, willy-nilly, like some people think that they have been, just out of FOMO.

38:10Nilay Patel:So I think the FOMO is going to drop down a little bit as they have to answer for almost every action they take as public companies.

38:18Hayden Field:But going public could make these companies themselves worth close to a trillion dollars each, even as investors pour more money back into them on the back of AI hype. One question looming over all of this is where the tech talent pipeline goes. And what happens when you start automating the very junior programmers and beyond that junior roles of all kinds in white collar work? If you don't have any junior people, where are you going to get the mid-career people? And if you don't have any mid-career people, where are you going to get the senior folks? We're already seeing layoffs across the board at tech companies.

38:49Hayden Field:They're all trying to do more with less. And then saying the cuts are because of AI. Or that they're all just trying to be leaner and more cost-conscious after the explosion of spending that we saw in the pandemic. It occurs to me that if these companies develop AGI, or even if they continue down the road they're on, which is very capable models that can basically automate software development, they will automate away a bunch of the jobs these engineers are doing that are getting paid all this money for. Does this market realize that? Is it contended with the idea that paying billions of dollars for a software engineer to develop the product that will automate the software engineer away is kind of a doom loop?

39:28Hayden Field:Or is that just not on anyone's radar?

39:30Nilay Patel:No, it's definitely on their radar. I think it's a bubble that's going to burst in AI. People are already asking questions about what Meta's engineers are doing with their eye-popping pay packages that they received. And a lot of software engineering work is already getting automated. And OpenAI and Anthropic are being pretty open about that. Like they'll regularly release results about, hey, this is how good our coding models are. They're now at the level of an entry level engineer at our company. They're now at X level. They're now Y level. So, you know, seeing those results change over time, a lot of engineers, I've personally talked to a lot of developers and engineers who are potentially worried that they're automating themselves out of a job and that they're also like losing part of their identity because AI is so good at coding.

40:13Nilay Patel:And they're like, oh, like, what does it need me for? I felt like this was an art form and something that required a lot of institutional knowledge and a certain prowess and finesse. And now all of my knowledge seems like it's just going to waste. But in terms of what is going to stay around, I think senior engineers are the main ones that are feeling a little bit less worried. They're still feeling weird about how good coding models are, but they're feeling a little less worried in terms of job security because there's always going to have to be someone directing, or at least as of right now, directing AI agents and delegating and directing the project.

40:53Nilay Patel:Whereas lower-level software engineers seem a lot more worried about automating themselves out of a job because that seems to be a lot closer on the horizon.

41:02Hayden Field:The thing about senior engineers being less at risk is you've got to get them from somewhere, right? You got to hire junior engineers and train them and develop them into senior engineers. But if we're hiring agents and AI to do all that work, where do the young tech workers come from? Where do the junior engineers come from? Like, is this talent pool shrinking? It seems like a set number of people are going to make all the money forever because you don't need to hire any young people anymore.

41:28Nilay Patel:Yeah, I think it's partly that. I mean, the talent pool of senior engineers is definitely shrinking. But I also think that they're going to be teaching different skills. The skills that people were learning to be an entry-level software engineer, maybe some of those will be defunct. Kind of like us having to learn cursive in school. You know what I mean? Like, when have I used cursive recently? You know, they're teaching the kids cursive again.

41:54Hayden Field:This is a real thing. They are? Oh, I'm kind of happy.

41:56Nilay Patel:It's a real thing.

41:57Hayden Field:The kids couldn't sign their names, so they started teaching them cursive again.

42:00Nilay Patel:Good. I was really depressed about the cursive thing. That's good to know. But yeah, I think that like the skills that are taught will be different. You know, I think the senior engineers will come from a different pipeline, maybe in terms of like colleges will be teaching different skill sets because you'll be tasked with more like delegating and directing AI agents instead of just like doing everything from the ground up. That's what I think will happen. We'll see. The skills required for the jobs that won't be automated will definitely be a little bit different. And a lot of engineers I've spoken with are already telling me that.

42:32Hayden Field:Can I ask you another rude question? Sure. Are all these people just trying to get their bag before the bubble pops? If I was being the most cynical, that's what I would say is all these people realize that what they're building is unsustainable. It can't actually do all the things that everyone says it can. Claude is not actually alive. I might as well collect my$500 million from Mark Zuckerberg, and then the bubble will pop and I'll live on a ranch and be free.

42:56Nilay Patel:It's not what I'm seeing because a lot of people are true believers. Like a lot of people really, really do want to have a hand in this and they would be doing it no matter how much money they're making because they want to be involved. And like sometimes even if they retire, they like come back and they're like, no, I want to be involved in this. I really believe in it. But I mean, of course, some people are doing what you just said. Like some people burn out. They're like, yeah, I'm going to go be a goat farmer. You know, it's like I had a hand in building this stuff. Now I'm disillusioned. I got to get out.

43:25Nilay Patel:But I think even that is more about their values. Like maybe their values changed or maybe the company so didn't align with their values anymore that they wanted to just get out of the industry entirely. And a lot of them honestly are now in the privileged position of they've made so much money that now they can make decisions based on just their beliefs. Yeah.

43:45Hayden Field:This is the best argument for UBI I've ever heard. Where do you get the values back? You just give everybody money. What should we be looking for in the next 6 to 12 months? Is it just more movement? Has it settled down? what's happening?

43:56Nilay Patel:I think that we're going to see a lot of AI companies finally have to answer to new people in terms of profit. And it's going to be really interesting to see what they do. Is Anthropic going to stick to its mission? Is it going to change its mission statement wording a bunch over the next year before it IPOs? Is OpenAI going to stay silent about military work? We're going to see a lot of potential changes. And I think we're also going to see a lot of movement as a result of that within these companies. As they get ready to IPO, what changes are they going to make to their mission and what they're building and what they're prioritizing and who's leaving as a result of that.

44:31Nilay Patel:So I would watch that. Another thing is that something that I'm hearing from some of the most realistic people in the industry is that enterprise AI is the future, like the non-glamorous B2B stuff, and that consumer-facing AI is going to shrink with M &A. So I think that a lot of the smaller firms, the ones that are mostly consumer-facing, we're going to see them acquired. So I think that's something to watch. Also, consumer-focused AI companies that are pivoting into enterprise to turn a profit. So I think we're going to see a lot of scrambling around money in the industry this year. And I think we're also going to see a lot of personnel moves because of that scramble around money.

45:05Nilay Patel:And maybe people will get disillusioned about what their company has become. Well,

45:09Hayden Field:it sounds like we're going to have to have you back very soon, Hayden. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Thanks so much. I'd like to thank Hayden for taking the time to join Decoder. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all the emails, or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. That's the same handle we have on TikTok, on Instagram, which are a lot of fun.

45:34Hayden Field:If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt. It's edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

45:52Thank you.