🤝 From Poaching to Partnership: The New Dynamics Shaping AI Talent
Week of July 7th, 2025
Upcoming Events
🌁 SF Bay Area
Thu, Jul 10th: The AI Collective & Windsurf ~ Open Build
Wed, Jul 30th: 🧠 The AI Collective SF 🧠 SF Newcomer Night
Wed, Jul 30th: AI + Wellness Fireside Chat 🔥 AI Collective X Brett Berhoff 🪵 Featuring: BlackRock
🗓️ Hungry for even more AI events? Check out SF IRL, MLOps SF, or Cerebral Valley’s spreadsheet!
🍑 Accra
Wed, Aug 27th: 💸🧠 Fintech & AI: Unstructured Data for Inclusive Credit
🍑 Atlanta [LAUNCH 🚀]
Wed, Jul 9th: 🧠 The AI Collective | Atlanta Chapter Kickoff!
Wed, Jul 16th: 🧠 The AI Collective | Atlanta Chapter Northside Networking w/Trivia
🇨🇦 Brampton [LAUNCH 🚀]
Thu, Jul 10th: 🧠 The AI Collective | Brampton Chapter Launch!
🚢 Cape Town [LAUNCH 🚀]
Thu, Jul 24th: The AI Collective - Cape Town Launch: Save The Date
Thu, Aug 21st: Save the Date - Walk And Talk
🤠 Dallas [LAUNCH 🚀]
Tue, Jul 8th: ✨AI Collective Dallas - Kickoff Event
🇮🇳 Delhi
Sat, Jul 26th: AI Collective Delhi <> IIT Delhi ✨ AI Synergy
🇿🇦 Johannesburg
🌴 Miami
Thu, Jul 10th: The AI Collective & Windsurf ~ Open Build Bicoastal
🍁 Montreal
🇫🇷 Paris
Tue, Jul 8th: 🪩 Post-RAISE AI Party — powered by The AI Collective 🧠
🇪🇨 Quito
Tue, Jul 15th: ✨AI Collective Ecuador - Kickoff Event
🇧🇷 São Paulo
Wed, Jul 30th: 🎨 2º Encontro do The AI Collective em São Paulo — Criatividade, IA e Conversas com Propósito
AI News Roundup
Written by AJ Green
Altman claps back at Meta’s recruiting surge
The News: Sam Altman addressed OpenAI researchers Monday night in a fiery internal message, calling Meta’s recent recruitment tactics "distasteful" and warning of potential "very deep cultural problems" at Meta.
The details:
Meta reportedly offered up to $300M over four years to top talent but failed to secure OpenAI’s "top people," instead hiring several notable researchers including Trapit Bansal, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren, Jiahui Yu, and Shengjia Zhao.
Altman reassured staff that OpenAI’s compensation structures are being reviewed, arguing that its stock offers "much, much more upside" than Meta’s.
He contrasted OpenAI’s mission-driven culture with what he called Meta’s "flavor of the week" mentality.
Meta's new Superintelligence Labs have already onboarded 11 researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Why it matters: OpenAI CRO Mark Chen compared Meta’s poaching to "someone breaking into our home," capturing the emotional toll. Altman remains confident OpenAI’s values will retain top talent and win the long game, even amid an escalating war for AI minds.
Sakana AI enables model teamwork
The News: Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based lab, has introduced AB-MCTS (Adaptive Branching Monte Carlo Tree Search), an algorithm that enables advanced AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek to collaborate on complex tasks — shifting away from the "bigger is better" approach in AI.
The Details:
AB-MCTS extends the Monte Carlo Tree Search method from AlphaGo to inference time, letting the system choose whether to refine a solution or generate new ones at each step.
The algorithm selects the most appropriate model for each sub-task: one might handle logical reasoning, another excels at code generation. See implementation details.
If one model errs, another can identify and correct the output — leading to better performance overall.
On the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, the team’s multi-agent setup solved 30% of problems, outperforming top solo models (23%) by 7%.
The underlying framework, TreeQuest, is now open source under Apache 2.0.
Why It Matters: AB-MCTS is ushering in an era of inference-time scaling and model cooperation. Just as human brains rely on specialized regions working together, this architecture points to a future where AI agents combine strengths to surpass monolithic models — accelerating our path to AGI.
Join The Minds Behind MiniMax M1: Technical Seminar
This Thursday, join the inaugural seminar for MiniMax-M1 - the world’s first open-weight, hybrid-attention LLM with a record-breaking 1M-token context window and a 456B MoE architecture. With only 45.9B active parameters per token and 25% of DeepSeek-R1's compute, M1 is setting new standards in efficiency, reasoning, and long-context capability.
What makes M1 special?
Hybrid Attention system combining Lightning + Softmax for unmatched reasoning precision.
1M token context (expandable to 4M), ideal for codebases, documents, and agentic workflows.
Ultra-efficient inference: uses just 25% of the compute vs DeepSeek R1 for 100K-token outputs.
Open-source Apache 2.0 license — ready for commercial + research deployment.
MATH-500: 96.8% , MMLU-Pro: 81.1% , SWE-bench: 56.0%
Featured Speakers include leaders from MiniMax, Anthropic, Hugging Face, MIT, HKUST, University of Waterloo, Nebius, and more.
🔗 Register HERE
🧠 Explore: GitHub | Hugging Face | Tech Report
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Premier Partner Spotlight: Roam
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About Noah Frank
Noah is a founder, innovation strategist, policy researcher, and community builder at the edge of AI. After consulting at BCG, he now guides governments, Fortune 500 teams, and early-stage startups on turning foresight into practical action. His work blends governance, product strategy, and revenue design to keep transformative tech aligned with human progress.
About AJ Green
AJ Green is a founder, writer, VC scout, chairman, and respected community leader in the AI and startup space. A former athlete turned tech entrepreneur, AJ is on a mission to make AI the great equalizer—scaling startups, connecting ecosystems, and turning disruption into opportunity. Borderline obsessed with building the infrastructure for the next generation of AI-native companies and the intelligence that power them.
The emoji for São Paulo is wrong. If you wanted the flag of Brazil it's 🇧🇷