Skip to content
AI Lately
Live · The Signal · W37
Monday, September 14, 2026
AI Lately

AI is about people, and what they have been up to lately.

Lately
Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Fidji SimoNscaleas Independent Director· Sep 11Josh EngelsMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Joe BentonMETRas Researcher· Sep 10Alan DuongCrux AIas Chief Development Officer· Sep 10Paul ChristianoOpenAI Foundationas Board Member, Safety and Security Committee· Sep 9Jacob CoxonIndependentas Independent AI Safety Advocate· Sep 8Geoffrey IrvingMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8Paul ChristianoMathematical AI Safety Instituteas Scientific Advisory Panel Member· Sep 8
Hiring & TalentFeature

The Biggest AI Hires of 2025

Meta's $14.3 billion Scale AI deal, OpenAI's C-suite rebuild, and Google's Windsurf license turned 2024 and 2025 into a two-year auction for AI's rarest asset: the researchers themselves.

Edited by Ryan Elliott Dennis8 min read · 1,901 words · 23 sources
Two people shaking hands across an office desk
Two people shaking hands across an office desk. Photo · Pexels
“Two license deals worth $2.4 billion and $2.7 billion bought Google an army of researchers it once let walk away, and Meta topped the entire market with a single afternoon's paperwork worth $14.3 billion.”

A three-year-old startup outbid entire national science budgets for a single afternoon's paperwork in the summer of 2025, and the receipt read $14.3 billion 12. That was the moment the AI talent war stopped resembling recruiting and started resembling arms procurement. Between January 2024 and December 2025, five companies rewrote their executive rosters, three billion-dollar labs splintered and re-formed, and a handful of researchers moved enough market capitalization with a signature to matter more than most acquisitions AI Lately will ever cover. Alexandr Wang, Fidji Simo, and Ilya Sutskever anchor the roster, and each pulled a different lever: equity, product command, and founder independence, respectively. This piece catalogs the moves that mattered, ranks the twenty biggest by strategic weight, and sets up the sequel: what 2026 has already done to the same roster.

The Raid

Meta's summer of 2025 supplied the era's defining transaction. The company paid $14.3 billion for 49% of Scale AI and installed the startup's 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as its first chief AI officer, launching Meta Superintelligence Labs under a Zuckerberg memo dated June 30 123. Jason Droege, Scale's chief strategy officer, stepped into the interim CEO chair Wang left behind 1, while Daniel Gross, who had run Safe Superintelligence Inc. as chief executive, joined Wang at Meta in early July after Meta's attempt to buy SSI outright collapsed; Ilya Sutskever assumed the SSI CEO role the same week 45. Nat Friedman, named alongside Wang among Time's most influential AI figures of the year, rounded out the lab's founding leadership 3. Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of ChatGPT, left OpenAI to become Meta Superintelligence Labs' chief scientist, a hire Inc. framed as Meta poaching its rival's newest research figurehead 6. Ruoming Pang, who had run Apple's AI foundation-models group, followed with a package Bloomberg and Entrepreneur separately pegged above $200 million 78. Ke Yang, an Apple search executive, made the same jump 9. By August, TheNextWeb reported Meta had absorbed five founding engineers from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, a raid so systematic that competitors recast their planning documents around retention 10. Reported nine-figure offers to additional OpenAI researchers, some cited near $100 million, turned the recruiting effort into a story about compensation as much as capability 8. Read as strategy, the pattern favored people who had already shipped production research over academic credentials alone, a preference for builders that shaped every subsequent counteroffer across the industry. Against the rest of the market, the offers reset engineering-pay benchmarks well past the small circle of labs that could actually match Meta's numbers.

The Rebuild

OpenAI absorbed the era's sharpest departures and answered with its own acquisitions. September 2024 delivered the shock: chief technology officer Mira Murati exited alongside two senior research executives on a single day, a walkout CNN and Fortune both treated as a genuine inflection point for the company's culture 15. Fast Company went further, framing the exits as evidence of a broader brain drain reshaping OpenAI's research culture 23. Ilya Sutskever had already left in May to found Safe Superintelligence, and John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder, departed for Anthropic that August before continuing on to Murati's Thinking Machines Lab by February 2025, a two-hop migration that traced the field's talent gravity as clearly as any org chart could 16. Sam Altman's response arrived earlier than the September exodus, in June 2024, when OpenAI brought in Sarah Friar as chief financial officer and Kevin Weil as chief product officer, pairing consumer-scale product instincts with finance discipline suited to a company approaching a public-market-grade balance sheet 1314. Mark Chen rose to chief research officer inside the same reshuffle, anchoring the research organization after Murati's exit. The rebuild culminated in May 2025 with Fidji Simo, Instacart's chief executive and a former Meta product leader, joining as OpenAI's inaugural CEO of Applications, reporting directly to Altman and tasked with commercializing ChatGPT at consumer scale 1112. Chris Lehane, a veteran of Airbnb's global policy operation, joined the same era to run OpenAI's outward-facing regulatory strategy, a hire that read as preparation for the antitrust and export-control fights covered elsewhere on this site. Taken together, the sequence shows a company that lost its research founders and replaced them with operators fluent in consumer products, finance, and Washington, a different leadership bench than the one Altman started 2024 with, and a bench built for commercial scale, a marked shift from the founding mission's original, research-first culture two years earlier.

The Retention Race

Google and Microsoft answered the raids with license-and-hire structures engineered to sidestep formal acquisitions. Its $2.4 billion license for Windsurf's coding-agent technology brought chief executive Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen into DeepMind, leaving Windsurf itself intact as a separate company 17. A year earlier, Google had run the identical playbook on Character.AI, paying a reported $2.7 billion to license the chatbot startup's technology while re-hiring founder Noam Shazeer, a Transformer co-inventor who had left Google in 2021 18. Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind's longtime research chief, absorbed both hires into an expanded architecture role spanning the lab's frontier work. Microsoft moved first, in March 2024, paying to bring Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind's co-founder and Inflection AI's chief executive, into a newly created Microsoft AI unit to run Copilot; UK regulators later declined to open an in-depth probe into the hiring pattern 1920. Jay Parikh joined Microsoft's leadership the following year to steady the company's broader AI engineering effort. Anthropic ran a quieter defense, hiring Krishna Rao as its first chief financial officer to professionalize a balance sheet swelling toward the scale of its frontier-lab rivals, and absorbing John Schulman for a brief stint in 2024 before his departure to Thinking Machines Lab 2116. Jan Leike, who had co-led OpenAI's alignment research before resigning in 2024, joined Anthropic's safety organization the same year, carrying core alignment expertise directly into a rival lab 22. Each incumbent picked a distinct defense: Google licensed its way around antitrust exposure, Microsoft folded an entire startup into a single division, and Anthropic hired one executive at a time, a slower approach that left it thinner on marquee names but arguably steadier on integration. That steadiness carried a cost of its own, since a company scaling toward Anthropic's revenue ambitions eventually needs the same product and infrastructure depth its rivals bought in bulk.

The Splinter Labs

Some of the era's biggest names launched competing labs of their own. Ilya Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. on June 19, 2024, alongside Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher, raising $1 billion by September and reaching a $30 billion valuation by March 2025, all before Gross departed for Meta and Sutskever took the CEO title himself 5. Mira Murati launched Thinking Machines Lab after her OpenAI exit, drawing Schulman and other alumni before Meta's raid pulled five founding engineers back out 1016. Apple absorbed the era's costliest defection: Ruoming Pang's and Ke Yang's moves to Meta left the company's foundation-models group publicly diminished, a loss Bloomberg framed as evidence Apple had become a farm system feeding rival labs 79. Amazon countered with its own acquihire, bringing Adept AI's David Luan into its artificial general intelligence effort alongside much of his former team. xAI spent the same period absorbing turnover among its founding researchers even as Elon Musk folded the company into X in an all-stock restructuring, a merger that reshaped who controlled the social data feeding Grok's training pipeline and gave the lab a fresh consumer distribution channel its frontier-lab peers had to build or buy separately. Every one of these moves shares a structural logic: a founder-scientist with enough personal credibility could raise capital and pull a team, collapsing the distance between a research lab and a startup pitch deck into a matter of weeks.

The Twenty That Mattered

Ranked by strategic weight, independent of the calendar, the twenty moves below reshaped who controls frontier research heading into 2026.

  1. Alexandr Wang parlayed Scale AI's data pipeline into a $14.3 billion Meta stake and the company's first chief AI officer title 12.
  2. Daniel Gross carried Apple-caliber product judgment from Safe Superintelligence straight into Meta's new lab leadership 4.
  3. Shengjia Zhao gave Meta a direct technical line to ChatGPT's own architecture as its new chief scientist 6.
  4. Ruoming Pang's $200 million-plus package gutted Apple's foundation-models bench in a single signature 78.
  5. Fidji Simo brought OpenAI a proven consumer-scale operator with Meta and Instacart on her résumé 1112.
  6. Varun Mohan handed Google a coding-agent team through a $2.4 billion technology license, a structure Google chose over a formal acquisition 17.
  7. Mustafa Suleyman gave Microsoft a DeepMind co-founder to run its entire consumer AI strategy 19.
  8. Ilya Sutskever pulled OpenAI's founding alignment philosophy out of the company entirely and rebuilt it at Safe Superintelligence 5.
  9. Mira Murati took OpenAI's product and engineering muscle memory and founded Thinking Machines Lab around it 16.
  10. Noam Shazeer returned to Google as the Transformer co-inventor it had let walk away in 2021 18.
  11. Sarah Friar supplied OpenAI with public-company-grade financial discipline ahead of its next funding rounds 1314.
  12. Kevin Weil paired Twitter- and Instagram-scale product experience with OpenAI's consumer ambitions 13.
  13. John Schulman's double hop from OpenAI to Anthropic to Thinking Machines Lab traced the entire field's gravity in one career 16.
  14. Jan Leike moved OpenAI's alignment research directly into Anthropic's safety organization 22.
  15. Krishna Rao became Anthropic's first CFO as the company scaled toward a public-market-grade balance sheet 21.
  16. Douglas Chen deepened Google's coding-agent bench alongside Mohan in the Windsurf transaction 17.
  17. Jason Droege kept Scale AI stable as interim CEO the moment Meta's deal pulled Wang away 1.
  18. Daniel Levy co-founded Safe Superintelligence with Sutskever and Gross, trading OpenAI research for founder equity 5.
  19. Ke Yang extended Meta's Apple raid past foundation models and into the search organization 9.
  20. OpenAI's September 2024 exodus, Murati plus two fellow research executives, forced the fastest C-suite rebuild of the two-year period 15.

By the numbers

  • Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49 percent stake in Scale AI, announced June 13, 2025 1.
  • Scale AI's implied valuation reached $29 billion after the transaction closed 1.
  • Google licensed Windsurf's coding-agent technology and hired its leaders for $2.4 billion in July 2025 17.
  • Character.AI's licensing arrangement with Google carried a reported $2.7 billion price tag in August 2024 18.
  • Apple's Ruoming Pang reportedly commanded a package above $200 million to join Meta 78.
  • Safe Superintelligence raised $1 billion in September 2024, reaching a $30 billion valuation seven months later 5.
  • Alexandr Wang was twenty-eight when Meta named him chief AI officer 2.
  • John Schulman completed two career hops, OpenAI to Anthropic to Thinking Machines Lab, inside ten months 16.

What to watch

The same roster kept moving through 2026, and AI Lately's companion piece, "The Biggest AI Hires of 2026 (So Far)," tracks where Meta Superintelligence Labs, OpenAI's applications division, and the founder-scientist labs stand today. Watch Scale AI's board for signs of how long Jason Droege's interim tag lasts; Safe Superintelligence's fundraising calendar will show whether Sutskever's solo leadership can sustain the valuation Gross helped build. Apple's foundation-models group remains the sector's clearest test of whether a depleted bench can recruit its way back to parity. Anthropic's next senior hire will show whether its quieter, one-executive-at-a-time style can keep pace with rivals willing to write nine-figure checks in a single sitting.

Sources

  1. TechCrunch Staff, "Scale AI confirms 'significant' investment from Meta, says CEO Alexandr Wang is leaving," TechCrunch, June 13, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/13/scale-ai-confirms-significant-investment-from-meta-says-ceo-alexandr-wang-is-leaving/
  2. CNBC Staff, "Scale AI's Alexandr Wang confirms departure for Meta as part of $14.3 billion deal," CNBC, June 12, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/12/scale-ai-founder-wang-announces-exit-for-meta-part-of-14-billion-deal.html
  3. CNBC Staff, "Mark Zuckerberg announces creation of Meta Superintelligence Labs. Read the memo," CNBC, June 30, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/30/mark-zuckerberg-creating-meta-superintelligence-labs-read-the-memo.html
  4. CNBC Staff, "Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross," CNBC, July 3, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/03/ilya-sutskever-is-ceo-of-safe-superintelligence-after-meta-hired-gross.html
  5. Wikipedia contributors, "Safe Superintelligence Inc.," Wikipedia, accessed 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Superintelligence_Inc.
  6. Ben Sherry, "Meta Poached Its New Chief Scientist for Superintelligence From OpenAI," Inc., June 30, 2025, https://www.inc.com/ben-sherry/meta-poached-its-new-chief-scientist-for-superintelligence-from-openai/91219795
  7. Bloomberg Staff, "Apple Loses Top AI Models Executive to Meta's Hiring Spree," Bloomberg, July 7, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-07/apple-loses-its-top-ai-models-executive-to-meta-s-hiring-spree
  8. Entrepreneur Staff, "Meta Is Reportedly Paying an Apple Engineer Over $200 Million to Join Its Superintelligence Effort," Entrepreneur, July 8, 2025, https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/meta-offers-former-apple-manager-hundreds-of-millions-in-pay/494485
  9. PYMNTS Staff, "Apple AI Crises Deepen as Search Exec Ke Yang Moves to Meta," PYMNTS, July 9, 2025, https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2025/apple-ai-crises-deepen-search-exec-ke-yang-moves-meta/
  10. TheNextWeb Staff, "Meta has hired five founding members of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab in a systematic talent raid," TheNextWeb, August 2025, https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-thinking-machines-lab-talent-raid
  11. CNBC Staff, "OpenAI hires Instacart CEO Fidji Simo as head of applications, reporting to Altman," CNBC, May 7, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/openai-hires-instacart-ceo-fidgi-simo-as-head-of-applications.html
  12. Bloomberg Staff, "OpenAI Recruits Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to Steer Operations," Bloomberg, May 8, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-08/openai-recruits-instacart-ceo-fidji-simo-to-lead-app-development
  13. OpenAI, "OpenAI welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)," OpenAI, June 10, 2024, https://openai.com/index/openai-welcomes-cfo-cpo/
  14. Axios Staff, "OpenAI hires Sarah Friar as CFO, Kevin Weil as Chief Product Officer," Axios, June 10, 2024, https://www.axios.com/2024/06/10/open-ai-sarah-friar-kevin-weil-hired
  15. CNN Staff, "Mira Murati, OpenAI's technology chief, becomes the latest exec to leave the company," CNN, September 25, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/25/tech/openai-technology-chief-mira-murati-leaving
  16. Fortune Staff, "OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup after brief stint at Anthropic," Fortune, February 6, 2025, https://fortune.com/2025/02/06/openai-john-schulman-mira-muratis-startup-anthropic
  17. CNBC Staff, "Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in $2.4 billion AI talent deal," CNBC, July 11, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/11/google-windsurf-ceo-varun-mohan-latest-ai-talent-deal-.html
  18. CNBC Staff, "Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with AI partnership," CNBC, August 2, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/02/ex-google-engineers-from-characterai-re-join-company-with-ai-partnership-.html
  19. Microsoft, "Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection Co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot," Official Microsoft Blog, March 19, 2024, https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/03/19/mustafa-suleyman-deepmind-and-inflection-co-founder-joins-microsoft-to-lead-copilot/
  20. CNBC Staff, "Microsoft dodges in-depth UK probe into hiring of staff from AI firm Inflection," CNBC, September 4, 2024, https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/04/microsoft-avoids-uk-probe-into-hiring-of-inflection-ai-employees.html
  21. Anthropic, "Krishna Rao joins Anthropic as Chief Financial Officer," Anthropic, 2025, https://www.anthropic.com/news/krishna-rao-joins-anthropic
  22. Wikipedia contributors, "Jan Leike," Wikipedia, accessed September 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Leike
  23. Fast Company Staff, "OpenAI brain drain: What to make of CTO Mira Murati's sudden exit," Fast Company, September 26, 2024, https://www.fastcompany.com/91197772/openai-brain-drain-what-to-make-of-cto-mira-muratis-sudden-exit

Cite this piece

AI Lately Desk, "The Biggest AI Hires of 2025," AI Lately, Aug 1, 2025, https://ailately.com/articles/biggest-ai-hires-of-2025

Tags: Meta · OpenAI · Google DeepMind · Microsoft · Anthropic · Scale AI · compensation · talent war

Related, lately

More →