AI Talent Wars has reached a hot pitch.
The emerging AI research lab and the tech giant have heightened efforts to recruit top AI talent over the past few years.
Naveen Rao, the vice president of AI at Databricks, equating the scramble of the highest-ranking AI talent with “looking for LeBron James,” estimates that there are fewer than 1,000 researchers who can build frontier AI models.
Startups lacking the financial resources to offer attractive pay packages like the large-scale high-tech peer have turned their eyes to hackathons to find budding talent in the AI sector.
The race to attract the best AI talent has led CEOs to become personally involved in recruiting, some of which have not been successful. And that's not always about the amounts offered. For example, the company Trow of Top of the Line Computing Chip in a Data Center line with NVIDIA H100 GPUs can play some.
Last year, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas described the situation he was trying to poach Meta's AI researchers. He was rejected, he said, the researchers told him “come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs.”
It would “take billions of dollars and five to ten years to get the highly coveted graphics processing unit from Nvidia,” Srinivas said at the time.
“We need to provide such amazing incentives and immediate computing. We're not talking about small computing here,” he added.
Speaking of meta, Mark Zuckerberg has become personally involved in the employment battle. An AI technician previously told BI he was surprised to see Zuckerberg appear in the email chain about where Zuckerberg is being employed.
Now it seems that Zuckerberg is leaning towards recruiting efforts. Bloomberg reported this week that Zuckerberg is hosting top AI candidates at home for meals, and the New York Times said Meta offered a 7-9-digit compensation package. Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment from BI.
It's not just Zuckerberg. Another tech worker with an AI background told Bi previously that Openai co-founder and CEO Sam Altman had personally called on them to insist on getting them to join the company.
“We definitely have a competing CEO email ongoing,” Dan Portillo, founder of Sweat Equity Ventures and co-founder of General Partnership, told BI previously.
“Corporate leaders feel they have open windows now, and one attribute of this moment is the aggression of CEOs and co-founders.
The company is also trying to join university campuses to convince undergraduates and doctoral degrees. Candidates with AI knowledge join the team and hang out the promise of enormous pay and generous research funding.
The AI race has led to swirling questions about the long-term impact of technology on the job market.
For AI researchers and engineers, the only question for engineers who can build the exact same model that will guide that change, is to decide which job offers best.
