Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI talent war: ‘Our talent retention is healthy'
During Alphabet's second-quarter earnings call, Pichai said Google has seen such moments before and that its core metrics remain 'healthy.'
'We continue to look at both our retention metrics, as well as the new talent coming in, and both are healthy,' Pichai said on the earnings call. 'I do know individual cases can make headlines, but when we look at the numbers deeply, I think we are doing well through this moment.'
Pichai also emphasised that Google understands what it takes to keep top AI researchers satisfied and it isn't all about the money. He cited the company's investments in greater access to compute, referring to the latest and most advanced computer chips.
At a time when the world's leading tech companies are laying off parts of their workforce due to the rise of artificial intelligence, they are simultaneously hiring specialised AI researchers, both from top PhD programs in machine learning and from among industry veterans who have created platforms at leading tech companies. From Meta and OpenAI to Google and Microsoft, these companies are aggressively poaching top AI talent from each other.
With Meta launching its Superintelligence Lab and hiring Apple's Foundation Models lead Ruoming Pang with a reported package exceeding $200 million, talent and compute have become the defining currencies in the AI world. In recent months, Meta also recruited Scale AI founder Alexandre Wang and a dozen veterans from OpenAI and DeepMind, signaling its deepening investment in AI.
In June, Adam Sadovsky. who spent nearly 18 years at Google, most recently as a distinguished software engineer and senior director at DeepMind left the company to join Microsoft. He now serves as a corporate vice president at Microsoft AI.
This current AI hiring frenzy echoes the intense 'war for talent' between Microsoft and Google in the 2000s, triggered by Google's meteoric rise. At the time, Google's focus on search attracted some of the brightest engineering minds, forcing Microsoft to revise its hiring and retention strategies. In 2005, Microsoft even sued Google after executive Kai-Fu Lee left the company to join Google, a milestone case that highlighted the fierce competition between the two tech giants over top talent.
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