Instead, she wants future hires at AMD to be wooed by the thought of being part of the company’s meteoric rise and making an impact on the future of technology.
“From a recruitment standpoint, it’s always like, ‘Do you want to be part of our mission?’ Because the ride is really what we’re trying to attract people to. It’s the ride of, ‘Look, if you want to come do important technology, make an impact, you’re not just a cog in the wheel, but you’re actually someone who’s going to drive the future of our road map, then you want to be at AMD.’”
Plus, it’s not like AMD staffers are underpaid: “I think people have done relatively well here, because the stock’s done OK,” Su added.
At the end of the day, the 55-year-old CEO says dishing out $100 million salaries to new staff would be unfair to existing workers on lower pay packages, still putting in hard work.
“It’s not really about one person in our world,” Su reasoned. “I mean, it’s really about great people, don’t get me wrong—we have some incredible people.”
Fortune reached out to AMD for comment.
“We are not willing to compromise our compensation principles, our principles of fairness, to respond individually to these offers,” Amodei said. “The way things work at Anthropic is there’s a series of levels. One candidate comes in, they get assigned a level, and we don’t negotiate that level, because we think it’s unfair. We want to have a systematic way.”
The Anthropic leader said Meta, and by extension Zuckerberg, are trying to buy employees who will be devoted to driving their AI models to new heights. But he may be hard pressed to find such loyalty; Anthropic has a 80% retention rate for employees hired over the last two years, while Meta is trailing behind at 64%.
