AI Race Gets Hotter: Meta, Google, OpenAI battle it out to recruit talents — And they are offering millions! Here's why
According to a report by The New York Times, young AI researchers in their 20s are being offered nine-figure compensation packages structured to be paid out over several years.
To navigate what lies ahead, these AI researchers are often acting as unofficial agents to strategise.
As per the NYT report, the Silicon Valley talents with expertise in AI are now playing hardball to earn more salary, just how top NBA players would do.
Yet, there is a difference. Unlike in basketball, there is no salary caps, leaving companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google offer sky high salaries to AI specialists.
The report says that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in his quest to recruit AI talents, offered 24-year-old Matt Deitke around $125 million in stock and cash over four years to join his company. Deitke, a startup founder, turned down the offer only to be approached again by Meta.
Zuckerberg returned with a revised offer of around $250 million over four years, with potentially up to $100 million of that to be paid in the first year, NYT said in its report.
AI talent recruitment has blown up over the past few months, with people announcing their job changes on social media. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg said Meta will continue to invest in AI 'because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do'.
While the AI talent hiring frenzy roots back to 2012 after three academics at the University at Toronto published a research paper that got them a $44 million offer from Google, it blew up in 2022 after the OpenAI boom.
The introduction of ChatGPT in 2022 led to a race to lead in AI. This was likely aided by the scarcity of people who have the technical knowledge and experience to work on advanced artificial intelligence systems.
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