Tech giants are poaching AI experts in droves

Tech giants are competing for artificial intelligence talent. The number of top talent is still relatively small, but demand for advanced skills is at an all-time high.

“Companies like Meta steal talent and keep it.”

JT O'Donnell is the founder and CEO of career coaching service Work It Daily.

Meta approach

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, sent personal emails to artificial intelligence experts at Google DeepMind. The company also offered potential employees jobs without an interview, according to a report by The Information.

At the beginning of the year, Zuckerberg announced that Meta was stocking Nvidia's sought-after H100 chips. In a conversation with The Verge, he clarified that by the end of 2024, his company will own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.

Meta's extensive inventory of chips serves as a valuable tool for attracting and retaining talent in an increasingly competitive environment for AI talent.

Practice Google

In 2022, Google CEO Sundar Pichai personally convinced three top researchers to leave Apple. Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly tried unsuccessfully to convince them to stay.

Recently, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, personally contacted an employee who was considering leaving for OpenAI. Brin managed to convince the employee to stay, including through additional promises and compensation.

However, the practice of retention is not always successful. Last week, Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of Google DeepMind, left his startup Inflection AI to head Microsoft's consumer AI division.

“I saw a founding machine learning engineer get 4% equity in a startup, which was completely unheard of before.”

Alex Libre, co-founder and chief recruiter at Einstellen Talent

Startup problems

Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Apple have offered AI talent salaries of up to $900,000 per year. Due to the need to compete with the offerings and resources of large tech companies, startups face challenges in recruiting.

Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, which develops an artificial intelligence-based question and answer engine, shared that he was unable to attract an employee from Meta due to the lack of GPUs in his company.

“I tried to recruit a highly qualified researcher from Meta, and do you know what he told me? Contact me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs. It would cost billions of dollars and take 5 to 10 years to get from Nvidia."

Aravind Srinivas, Founder and CEO, Perplexity

Experts say that once employers and employees have a better understanding of the technology, filling AI-related positions will become much easier.