Shawn Shen, the 28-year-old co-founder and CEO of Memories.ai, is making bold moves in the AI talent war by offering up to $2 million in compensation packages to lure top researchers from Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, and xAI. Shen, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and previously worked as a research scientist at Meta, launched Memories.ai this year after leaving the company. The startup is building AI systems capable of seeing and remembering visual data in ways that mimic human cognition. Memories.ai recently raised an $8 million seed round backed by Samsung and other investors. Now, the company is aggressively recruiting, offering high cash and equity packages to attract elite talent. The company is particularly focused on hiring experts in video understanding—a niche but critical area for next-generation AI. Shen says the decision to offer such large packages stems from the intense competition sparked by Meta’s own aggressive hiring tactics. He notes that Meta has made multi-million-dollar offers to top researchers, including those joining its new Meta Superintelligence Labs unit. These moves have caused internal strain and led to talent departures across the company. Despite the high costs, Shen says the company isn’t worried about running out of capital. He emphasizes flexibility in compensation, allowing candidates to choose between more cash or more equity—positioning hires as founding members rather than typical employees. Equity, he argues, could deliver a hundred- or even a thousandfold return if the company succeeds. Memories.ai plans to hire three to five researchers in the next six months, and another five to ten within the next year. The company also intends to raise additional funding, confident that strong talent acquisition will make fundraising easier. Shen points to recent successes by other AI startups—like Thinking Machines Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s venture—as proof that investors prioritize access to top talent. He also notes that Meta’s frequent reorganizations, which can disrupt research goals and team stability, are a key factor driving talent away. “Your manager and your objectives can change every few months,” he says. “For some researchers, that’s frustrating and feels like wasted time.” Shen credits Meta with shaping his vision. He valued the company’s bottom-up culture and open collaboration across teams, especially in areas like multimodal and personalized AI. But he ultimately left to pursue his own mission: building a company that could truly innovate at the frontier of visual AI. He’s already hired Chi-Hao Wu, a former Meta research scientist and leader of the generative AI team now part of Meta Superintelligence Labs, as chief AI officer. Wu is being compensated at a level comparable to the new offers. Shen is also in talks with other researchers from Meta Superintelligence Labs and Google DeepMind. For Shen, the goal isn’t just to compete—it’s to create something transformative. “The biggest risk today,” he says, “is not taking any risk at all. Why not build something that could change the world?”