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Lovable CEO Anton Osika says he isn’t bothered by Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive AI hiring spree at Meta.
In an interview that aired Monday, Osika told podcaster Harry Stebbings that his vibe-coding startup was looking for a “very different type of talent” than Meta.
“For Zuck, it’s like there’s these 10 people that know everything about how to train foundation models and he’s paying more for that knowledge than for these people,” Osika told Stebbings.
But that sort of talent isn’t what Lovable is looking for, Osika said.
“They wouldn’t perform as well as the engineers in my team, doing what we are doing. So it’s a very different type of talent,” he added.
Representatives for Osika and Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Osika said hiring at Lovable doesn’t involve dangling hefty bonuses to make it easier for him to find good candidates.
“If I knew who was the perfect engineer to hire, I could maybe step up our compensation bands to get exactly those. But I don’t know who are the best people,” Osika said.
“So I need to just figure out — are these really, really good people to work with? Are they moldable? Are they going to work well together in this team?” he continued.
Osika did not elaborate further on the traits he looks for in candidates, though he did say that he is drawn to those who can adapt quickly to their environment.
“If I talk to someone and I learn a lot of things from them, and I notice that my conversation is very dynamic and exciting, that is usually a very good indicator,” he said.
The cutthroat competition for AI talent has seen tech giants like Meta shelling out $100 million signing bonuses to lock down hires.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a June podcast that he found it “crazy” that Meta was willing to spend so much to acquire talent. Altman added that he was “really happy that, at least so far, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that.”
“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,” Altman said on the podcast.
Osika and Altman aren’t the only ones who think big pay packages aren’t a silver bullet for securing AI talent.
AMD CEO Lisa Su said in an interview with Wired published last week that she didn’t think she would ever offer a billion-dollar pay package to a potential 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 told Wired.
“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.
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