The rivalry between xAI and OpenAI is heating up again - this time, over wood-fired pizza. Over the weekend, Elon Musk and an OpenAI engineer jockeyed on X about wood-fired crusts, dough fermentation, and campus chefs. On its face, it was a lighthearted back-and-forth about free pizza for lunch. Underneath, it encapsulates a trend playing out in Silicon Valley: rival AI companies are publicly pitching culture - and perks like free lunch - in the talent war for top engineers.
Chimka also notes that these tools were designed to cater to small business leaders-whose survey feedback to LinkedIn reinforced a common theme, echoed by many owners, that finding skilled talent remains challenging. This source of frustration is more of a problem of perception, rather than a lack of skills, he says. Applicants seeking to pivot into a new industry, for example, may not have the obvious qualifications companies are looking for, but that doesn't mean they can't do the job. LinkedIn Hiring's AI aims to give these candidates a fair shot by making the process more "skills based," he said.
Zuckerberg, Chen said, has personally "hand-cooked" and "hand-delivered" soup to researchers he wanted to recruit away from OpenAI. And it wasn't a joke, the executive insisted. "It was shocking to me at the time," Chen admitted. But in Silicon Valley, if the enemy brings broth, you must respond in kind. Chen confessed he has now adopted the tactic, delivering soup to his own recruits as he hopes to poach talent from Meta.
When the model for the company was curated at a hackathon in São Paulo, Foody knew that he, Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha had built something that couldn't be replicated in classrooms. Its AI-powered hiring platform automates aspects of the hiring process, such as resume screening, candidate matching and AI-powered interviews. Within nine months, he and his co-founders had turned the idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate, which they claim is one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era.
A recruiter's day often involves processing many applications, making it easy for eligible applicants to get buried. Between sorting resumes, filtering out mismatches, and keeping up with follow-ups, there's barely any time left for what really matters-hiring the right people. That's exactly why more companies are turning to AI. In fact, 88% of organizations already use AI to handle tasks like initial screening.