Google CEO Sundar Pichai called its retention metric “health” except for concern about the company's ability to attract and retain Top AI talent during Tech Giant's second quarter revenue calls.
On Wednesday, Pichai publicly addressed the latest wave of raging AI Talent Wars in Silicon Valley. These wars are burdened by the announcement of Meta's “Super Intelligence” division and poaching of some researchers with a multi-million-dollar wage package.
With the competition becoming so intense, some analysts are worried about increasing the cost of staying at the cutting edge of AI.
Bernstein analyst Mark Schmlik asked Pichai about recruiting top researchers in the context of Google's “AI-related resource costs” and how competition affects the company's ability to maintain talent.
In response, Pichai said Google had experienced such moments before, touting its core metrics as remaining “healthy.”
“We will continue to look at both retention metrics and new talent, both are healthy,” Pichai said in a revenue call. “I know that individual cases can make headlines, but if you look deeper into the numbers, I think they're doing well throughout this moment.”
Business Insider asked Google if they could share some of those metrics. The tech giant did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Several members of Meta's new Superintelligence team once worked at Google. For example, Meta Poached Pei Sun, a researcher who worked on improving Google's Gemini AI assistant and its self-driving vehicle, Waymo.
It's not just about the poaching Googlers of Meta. New AI startups like Openai and Anthropic have also sucked up top talent in Google's Deepmind category, according to a report by Signalfire.
For example, this report found that researchers were 11 times more likely to leave Google for humanity than the other way around.
During the revenue call, Pichai said he knew what Google needed to keep top AI researchers happy. It wasn't just money.
Pichai, for example, said Google is investing more in its access to computing.
He also said the top researchers “a mission and how cutting edge the work is, and it's important to them,” he said.
