You are right to question that. I am basing that statement off of the many famous engineers that have recently left and were very highly paid. My guess is Google is ceding the frontier and the high salaries that go with it and letting Anthropic/OpenAI fight over the high priced talent that exit. The remaining non-famous engineers will not be able to command celebrity salaries. But this is just speculation and I don't have great evidence that the celebrity salaries are enough to meaningfully reduce overall talent costs.
A counter point would be OAI and Anthropic can pay with more equity that they can promise will go to the moon. But all the equity base compensation eventually dilutes earnings per share so it's not free once you go public and people start caring about that.
Agreed. One effect I had in mind was much simpler: if you are the cool new company, people will want to work for you and might even take a hit in salary to do so.
A counter point would be OAI and Anthropic can pay with more equity that they can promise will go to the moon. But all the equity base compensation eventually dilutes earnings per share so it's not free once you go public and people start caring about that.