Venture capital firm SignalFire’s headcount report published Thursday shows Anthropic and OpenAI are leading the pack in talent growth. But with those startups’ still relatively small headcounts and short histories that makes assessing retention difficult, Meta emerges as the “Best in Show.” Over the past year, two engineers joined Meta for each one who left, according to the data.
While Meta is throwing around some of the biggest numbers in the industry for top AI talent (even if many are beefed up by stock options), it’s also scaling laterally. And despite concerns AI will replace engineers, most companies are still on the hiring spree. Tesla, however, is the exception. After a tough year where CEO Elon Musk turned new audiences against the product and sales prospects faltered, the carmaker was the only big tech firm to lose more engineers than it gained.