Meta raids OpenAI 🧑‍💻, OpenAI rethinks comp 💰, Claude’s vending machine 🥤

Meta has hired several researchers from OpenAI, including Trapit Bansal, Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

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Schedule a demo to learn more 🚀 Headlines & Launches Meta reportedly hires four more researchers from OpenAI (1 minute read) Meta has hired several researchers from OpenAI, including Trapit Bansal, Shengjia Zhao, Jiahui Yu, Shuchao Bi, and Hongyu Ren. The hiring spree comes after the April launch of Meta's Llama 4 AI models, which reportedly have not performed as well as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had hoped. Meta's rumored $100 million signing bonuses, which have only been offered to senior leaders, are apparently more complex than a simple one-time signing bonus, according to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth. It's Known as 'The List'—and It's a Secret File of AI Geniuses (14 minute read) 'The List' is a compilation of the most talented engineers and researchers in artificial intelligence put together by Mark Zuckerberg over the past few months. It contains researchers from elite schools who have worked at cutting-edge startups like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. This article looks at some of these people and why some of the richest companies in the world have decided they are worth so much. While a superteam of AI engineers comes at a high price, it still only costs a fraction of AI infrastructure like data centers. OpenAI Responds to Meta's Talent Poaching (2 minute read) Following a wave of high-profile departures to Meta, OpenAI leadership is actively adjusting compensation and recognition strategies to retain talent, according to internal memos. The company is reportedly engaging directly with staff holding competing offers. China's biggest public AI drop since DeepSeek, Baidu's open source Ernie, is about to hit the market (7 minute read) Chinese technology giant Baidu plans to make its Ernie generative AI large language model open source. The open sourcing will be a gradual roll-out. Disruptors like DeepSeek have proven that open-source models can be as competitive and reliable as proprietary ones. Baidu's decision to open source is an important one for the global AI race - every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry. 🧠 Deep Dives & Analysis Claude Ran a Real Vending Machine Business for a Month—Here's How It Went (10 minute read) Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs to have Sonnet 3.7 operate an automated store in its San Francisco office, handling everything from inventory management to customer service via Slack. While Claude successfully found suppliers and adapted to customer requests—even for unusual items like tungsten cubes—it consistently lost money by selling items below cost and getting talked into discounts. Claude also hallucinated meetings with fictional people, claimed to physically visit The Simpsons' address, and insisted it could wear blazers and make deliveries in person. Blackwell: Nvidia's Massive GPU (19 minute read) Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs continue the company's long tradition of building giant GPUs. GB202, which occupies a massive 750mm2 of area and has 92.2 billion transistors, is the largest Blackwell die. Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell features the largest GB202 configuration to date. It comes incredibly close to AMD's MI300X in terms of vector FP32 throughput and is far ahead of Nvidia's own B200 datacenter GPU. The memory subsystem is a monster as well. 🧑‍💻 Engineering & Research Concierge: Talk to your apps with natural language (Sponsor) Wish AI understood your context? Concierge is the highest performance connected AI platform, that can talk to your favorite apps (Gmail, Slack, Jira, Attio, Linear, Drive, HubSpot, etc) and take actions for you. Try Concierge for free or use "TLDR3" at checkout to get Concierge Pro for 3 months. Life of an inference request (vLLM V1): How LLMs are served efficiently at scale (10 minute read) vLLM is an open-source inference engine that serves large language models. This blog post describes how an inference request travels through vLLM's OpenAI-compatible API server and core engine. It focuses on the new V1 architecture of vLLM and how it achieves state-of-the-art text generation performance. Readers should be familiar with the transformer architecture and large language models - a link to a video by OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy that explains these is available. Genesys: LLM Agents That Discover Better LLMs (GitHub Repo) The Allen Institute for AI has open-sourced Genesys, a distributed evolutionary system where LLM agents automatically discover improved language model architectures through genetic programming. Federated Learning with Encrypted Data Sharing (16 minute read) FedEDS is a new scheme for federated learning on edge devices that shares encrypted data across clients, addressing performance issues tied to data heterogeneity and physical distribution. 🎁 Miscellaneous Full Stack: China's Evolving Industrial Policy for AI (33 minute read) RAND, the influential policy analysis firm, released a comprehensive analysis of China's AI industrial policy. Beijing has poured $8.2 billion into investment funds and state-backed research labs to keep pace with the United States despite GPU export controls. China's most advanced AI models are being developed by private tech firms like DeepSeek with massive government backing. What it takes to sue OpenAI as a journalism nonprofit (9 minute read) One year into its copyright lawsuit, the Center for Investigative Reporting remains one of only two nonprofit news organizations challenging OpenAI in court. Its stance highlights a stark divide in the news industry: sue the AI companies that scraped your content without permission, or take their money and partnerships as a financial lifeline while the legal precedents get decided by others. PyTorch and vLLM Deepen Integration for Efficient LLM Inference (4 minute read) vLLM and PyTorch have expanded integration with support for quantization, attention customization, and heterogeneous hardware. ⚡ Quick Links Want more news from TLDR? (Sponsor) You'll probably like our flagship newsletter. It's all about tech, science, and programming. Same quick format. Still free. Subscribe now. Meta Seeks $29 Billion from Private Capital Firms for AI Data Centers (3 minute read) The financing package includes $3 billion in equity and $26 billion in debt as Meta races to match Microsoft's planned $80 billion capital expenditure for fiscal 2025. OpenAI hires team behind AI recommendation startup Crossing Minds (1 minute read) Crossing Minds largely worked with e-commerce companies to improve personalization and recommendation systems. Meta in talks to acquire voice-cloning startup Play AI (1 minute read) Meta is in talks to acquire voice-cloning startup Play AI to enhance its consumer-facing AI features. Anthropic Economic Futures Program Launch (4 minute read) Anthropic is offering rolling grants up to $50K and API credits for empirical research on AI's impact on labor and productivity. Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! https://refer.tldr.tech/0b6a6dc1/2 Track your referrals here. Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of AI professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! 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