How to Find top Talent in 2026: This Week in AI Roundtable Clips

The AI talent market broke in 2025. After Meta’s $250M compensation offers pulled developers out of OpenAI, hiring expectations across the industry permanently shifted. Now OpenAI has responded by ending vesting cliffs for new employees, a rare and aggressive move that could reshape startup compensation and culture. Founders Mikey Shulman, Wade Foster, and Ali Ansari from Suno, micro1 and Zapier unpack what this means in practice: how Meta reset the market, why AI researchers are the hardest hires in the world, how AI tools are changing the developer pipeline, and what smaller companies can still compete on when pay is no longer the lever. A candid conversation about AI hiring, compensation, culture, and the future of building companies in the AI era. Timestamps 0:00 Meta’s $250M offers & OpenAI’s hiring shock 0:18 Vesting cliffs explained — and why OpenAI ending them matters 1:25 How Meta reset compensation expectations across AI 3:45 The real bottleneck: AI researchers in San Francisco 7:31 Are AI tools actually expanding the developer pipeline? 10:40 How AI changes hiring, teamwork, and company culture #jobs #hiring #work #ai 🤖 If you want to stay ahead of the curve on all things AI, make sure to join our community across all platforms: 📩 Get the Weekly Newsletter: https://thisweekinai.ai/ 📸 Instagram: www.instagram.com/thisweekinaipodcast 📱 TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinaipodcast