Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, recently shared his thoughts on Meta’s aggressive push to hire AI talent. In an interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Hassabis said Meta is offering big salaries to attract experts from top companies like OpenAI, Apple, GitHub, and Google.
“It’s probably rational what they’re doing from their perspective,” he said. “They’re behind and they need to do something.”
Hassabis explained that while high pay is becoming more common in the AI world, many researchers are motivated by more than just money. “There’s more important things than just money,” he said. “The mission to steward that technology safely is what drives many of us.”
He also shared how much the field has changed. In the early days of DeepMind, funding was limited and he even worked without pay for years. “Now interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round,” he noted.
Inside Google, there’s growing talk that Hassabis might be a future CEO. Some employees see similarities between his rise and that of current Google CEO Sundar Pichai. With Hassabis now leading what insiders call “the most important team at Google,” speculation continues to grow.
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