What would you give an AI engineer who has everything? Perhaps the freedom to do what they want.
The AI talent war is defined by multi-million dollar compensation packages and multi-billion dollar acquisitions, but venture capitalist Jason Lemkin, also known as the “Godfather of Sars,” says it’s not all about the money.
Lemkin said on a recent episode of the 20VC podcast that companies looking to acquire top researchers should offer them something equally valuable: the ability to work on the problems they care about with fewer constraints.
“When you talk to people who are on the cutting edge of AI, it’s very fascinating,” Lemkin said.
For example, long before the generative AI boom, Google cultivated a research center that became a concentration center for elite AI talent. We acquired DeepMind in 2014, allowing the people who run the company to stay in London and continue building their own stuff. It has since become one of the most important AI research institutes in the world.
“Google at that time created an environment where the best researchers in the world wanted to be there,” Lemkin said.
But this month, two prominent AI researchers left the company.
Noam Shazeer, co-leader of Gemini, Google’s flagship AI model family, announced earlier this month that he was leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer is a co-inventor of the Transformer architecture, which is the basis for most major large-scale language models.
A few days later, John Jumper of Google DeepMindHe, who shared a Nobel Prize with CEO Demis Hassabis for his work at AlphaFold, also announced his retirement from Anthropic.
Lemkin said the resignations may reflect “the reality that we have to strive to be No. 1 in AI.” As new competitors enter the fray, the free-wheeling research environment that once made Google DeepMind so attractive could come under threat as it faces pressure to ship new products and integrate into Google’s larger product ecosystem. Anthropic and OpenAI, meanwhile, may be better able these days to provide the freedom to focus on the biggest AI questions of the day, Lemkin said.
“When you talk to some of the smartest engineers and developers in the AI space, they’re really looking for a very specific environment that allows them to do what they want to do,” he said.