Tech startups and behemoths are duking it out for the best AI talent.
DataBricks’ VP of AI described the AI talent search as “looking for LeBron James.”
As CEOs try to poach top AI researchers and engineers, companies’ AI infrastructure can also be a factor.
The AI talent wars are reaching a fever pitch.
Upstart AI research labs and tech industry giants alike have heightened their efforts to recruit top AI talent over the past few years.
Naveen Rao, DataBricks’ vice president of AI, has equated the scramble for top-tier AI talent to “looking for LeBron James,” estimating there are fewer than 1,000 researchers capable of building frontier AI models.
Startups that lack the financial resources to offer attractive pay packages like their Big Tech peers are turning to hackathons to find budding talent in the AI sector.
The race to attract the best AI talent has led CEOs to personally get involved in recruiting efforts, some of which aren’t successful. And it’s not always about the amount of money being offered. Companies’ troves of top-of-the-line computing chips — data centers lined with Nvidia H100 GPUs, for example — can play a part.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas last year described a situation in which he was trying to poach an AI researcher from Meta. He was rebuffed, he said, with the researcher telling him, “Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs.”
Getting the highly coveted graphics processing units from Nvidia would “cost billions and take five to 10 years to get,” Srinivas said at the time.
“You have to offer such amazing incentives and immediate availability of compute. And we’re not talking of small compute clusters here,” he added.
Speaking of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has become personally involved in the hiring fray. An AI tech worker previously told BI they were surprised to see Zuckerberg appear in an email chain about a position for which they were being recruited.
Now, it sounds like Zuckerberg is only leaning into recruiting efforts. Bloomberg reported this week that Zuckerberg has been hosting top AI candidates at his home for meals in an effort to recruit them, and The New York Times said Meta has offered seven- to nine-figure compensation packages. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.
It’s not just Zuckerberg, either. Another tech worker with an AI background previously told BI that OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman called them to personally make the case for them to join the company.
“There is definitely some competing CEO emailing going on,” Dan Portillo, founder of Sweat Equity Ventures and cofounder of The General Partnership, previously told BI.
“Leaders of companies are operating on a feeling that there’s a window in time that’s open right now, and one of the attributes of this moment is the aggressiveness of CEOs and cofounders saying, ‘We will use every advantage we have to win employees and to win business,'” Tribe AI CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson said at the time.
Companies are also looking to college campuses to try to convince undergrad students and Ph.D. candidates with AI knowledge to join their teams, dangling the promise of huge salaries and generous research funding.
The AI race has led to swirling questions around the technology’s long-term impact on the job market.
For the AI researchers and engineers capable of building the very same models ushering in that change, the only question is deciding which job offer is best.
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