Memories.ai
Shawn Shen is the 28-year-old cofounder and CEO of Memories.ai, a startup that builds AI to see and understand visual data. He got a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge before joining Meta as a research scientist. Late last year, Shen left Meta to launch his startup, raising an $8 million seed round this summer backed by Samsung and others.
Meta has supercharged the Silicon Valley talent wars by making staggering, nine-figure offers for some AI researchers and starting a new AI unit, Meta Superintelligence Labs. That’s sparked tensions in its sprawling AI operations, with some Meta staff leaving.
Memories.ai announced Thursday that it’s offering up to $2 million compensation packages for researchers from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, xAI, and others. It also recently hired Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist, as its chief AI officer.
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Shen. It has been edited for length and clarity. Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Why I’m offering AI researchers $2 million
It’s because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked — it’s really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.
We’re building an AI model that can see and remember just like humans. The things that we are working on are very niche. So we are looking for people who are really, really good at the whole field of understanding video data.
We’re not worried about running out of money
We are welcoming people who want to take more equity compared to cash, which means that it won’t shrink our runway by a huge amount. The exact cash-versus-equity split will depend on the person we hire. We will treat these hires as founding members, not as employees. Anyways, equity is where you can get a hundred or even a thousand times return in the future.
We are thinking of hiring three to five people in the next 6 months, and another five to ten in the next 12 months. We plan to raise more money, too.
Spending so much on talent will help, not hurt, our fundraising
As long as we have the ability to consistently attract top AI talent, raising additional capital will not be a problem. The capital markets are eager to back companies that can do this. Just look at how much Thinking Machines Labs has raised or how much Fei-Fei Li’s startup has raised. As long as an AI company can recruit the best AI people, they can really just go through any kind of economic period.
Meta’s constant reorgs help our hiring efforts
Meta is constantly doing reorganizations. Your manager and your goals can change every few months. For some researchers, it can be really frustrating and feel like a waste of time. So yes, I think that’s a driver for people to leave Meta and join other companies, especially startups.
There’s other reasons people might leave. I think the biggest one is what Mark (Zuckerberg) has said: in an age that’s evolving so fast, the biggest risk is not taking any risks. So why not do that and potentially change the world as part of a trillion-dollar company?
We have already hired Eddy Wu, our Chief AI Officer who was my manager’s manager at Meta. He’s making a similar amount to what we’re offering the new people. He was on their generative AI team, which is now Meta Superintelligence Labs. And we are already talking to a few other people from MSL and some others from Google DeepMind.
I learned a lot of great things from Meta
I definitely learned a lot from Meta because Meta is very bottom-up. So you see a lot of innovations across different departments. Things like multimodal, visual, and super-personalized AI — everyone is so open to talking about their ideas. I met with so many talented people. I made an effort to meet three to four of them every week to talk about our hobbies and future goals.
It really shaped my future and gave me a clear road map. But in the end, the reason I left Meta is that I wanted to start a great company.
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