AMD CEO Lisa Su says that when it comes to attracting top AI talent, it’s the mission, not money, that matters.
Su spoke to Wired in an interview published Tuesday, when she was asked about the hefty pay packages Mark Zuckerberg has been using to attract top AI researchers to Meta.
The 55-year-old told the outlet she didn’t think she would ever offer a billion-dollar pay package to a potential AMD hire.
“I think competition for talent is fierce. I am a believer, though, that money is important, but frankly, it’s not necessarily the most important thing when you’re attracting talent,” Su said.
“It’s important to be in the ZIP code of those numbers, but then it’s super-important to have people who really believe in the mission of what you’re trying to do,” she added.
AMD and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
The ongoing war for AI talent has seen tech giants like Meta and Microsoft offer multimillion-dollar salaries to secure hires.
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The competition has become so cutthroat that some companies are even cold-emailing candidates who have already secured job offers with rival companies.
Yangshun Tay, an AI engineer based in Singapore, told Business Insider’s Charles Rollet that he received a near-instant email from Meta after he posted his job offer from OpenAI on LinkedIn. Meta asked Tay if he’d be interested in working for them.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a June podcast that he found it “crazy” that Meta was trying to poach his staff with $100 million signing bonuses. He added that he was “really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
Altman shared a similar view to Su’s on Meta’s use of generous pay packages to lure talent.
“The strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,” he said on the June podcast.
