Sudarshan Kamath, founder of Smallest AI, is among the many entrepreneurs eager to hire from the 600 employees that Meta has laid off from its AI division. The US-based IITian took to social media this morning to announce that laid-off Meta employees were welcome to apply to his company.
The announcement came just hours after Meta laid off 600 employees, primarily from its AI infrastructure units, Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research unit (FAIR) and other product-related positions.
“We’re hiring”
“Laid off from Meta? We are hiring in speech team for Smallest AI in San Francisco!” the founder of Smallest AI announced.
Kamath offered high salaries as incentive. He said that compensation could range between $200,000 to $600,000 as base salary, with equity on top.
At $600,000 base, an employee would be earning well over half a million dollars. However, the job openings did come with a set of requirements. “Looking for – experience with speech evals, speech generation, full duplex speech to speech,” Kamath announced, adding that the selected candidate should be “f***ing smart and hungry”.
Candidates with suitable qualifications were asked to message Kamath directly.
Kamath is one among many founders who have made similar offers.
Ben Taylor, founder of Spec, wrote: “To everyone impacted by today’s Meta AI layoffs: The work you’ve done has shaped how all of us think about intelligence. With spec, we’re building ambient intelligence that’s human-centered, contextual, and privacy-first.
“If you’ve been part of what made Meta AI great and are looking for what’s next, my DMs are open!”
“If you were recently laid off at Meta Gen AI, my dms are open. Help us build the next frontier of Apache-2.0 models,” wrote Lucas Atkins of Arcee AI.
Carina Hong, hiring for Axiom, also addressed her hiring post to laid off Meta employees. “You are world-class. We have read your work. You deserve a new place you call home,” she said.