Mark Zuckerberg, worth $200 billion, is now delivering soup.

Happy Friday!

Curse and Coffee friends,

Today, we explore Zuck’s new role delivering soup.

Hit reply and let us know what you think (we read all of your kind words).

Coffee at the ready…

The take: The soup is an admission. When you have $10 billion for talent and still can't close, you've lost.

What happened: OpenAI's chief research officer, Mark Chen, revealed on the Core Memory podcast that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally hand-cooked and hand-delivered soup to researchers he was trying to poach.

Why it matters: The AI talent pool is microscopic—fewer than 1,000 people globally can build frontier models—and they're choosing mission over money. Meta's retention sits at 64%. Anthropic, which isn't making soup or headlines, leads at 80%.

What to watch: Meta's Superintelligence Lab ships its first model. That's when we learn if the hires were worth the broth.

OpenAI is planning an off-site cooking class to woo recruits. The talent war is now a potluck with equity.

Before we slurp into today’s brew…

Here are some wordies from today’s sponsor.

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Who is winning the AI war?

Engineers are 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic's favor.

No soup. No $100 million headlines. No CEO doing meal prep.

Anthropic employees cite intellectual discourse, researcher autonomy, and flexible work options.

The unsexy stuff that doesn't make podcasts.

Meanwhile, when Meta hired eight OpenAI researchers in June, Chen sent a Slack memo saying it felt "as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something."

Zuckerberg's real competition is a company that figured out you don't need theatre if you have conviction.

The soup tells you Meta knows this.

But doesn't know how to fix it.

The case for soup diplomacy: Personal attention from a CEO signals that talent matters more than headcount. When someone worth $200 billion shows up at your door, that's a story you tell.

The case against: If your recruiting strategy requires the fifth-richest person on Earth to do food delivery, the problem is your culture.

Our read: Anthropic is winning at 80% retention without a single headline. The soup is content. The spreadsheet is the scoreboard.

SignalFire — 2025 State of Talent Report

"Engineers are 8 times more likely to leave OpenAI for Anthropic than the reverse. From DeepMind, the ratio is nearly 11:1 in Anthropic's favour." Signalfire

Why it matters: Anthropic isn't in this story because it doesn't need to be. That's the point.

Engineers leave OpenAI for Anthropic 8:1. No soup involved. [SignalFire]

🔗 The $100M that wasn't — Altman said it was a signing bonus. Meta said total comp. The engineer who left called it "fake news." Truth's in the fine print.

🔗 OpenAI's "broken into our home" memo — Chen's June Slack message after Meta hired eight researchers. This is what panic sounds like in corporate.

🔗 The full Core Memory episode — Two hours with Chen on GPUs, poker, and why he's planning a cooking class to fight back.

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