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By Anna Tong, Kenrick Cai
SAN FRANCISCO (newsinpo.site) -The contest in Silicon Valley to dominate artificial intelligence is playing out on a new court: superstar researchers.
While the scramble to attract top talent and keep them happy has always been a hallmark of the tech industry, since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, recruiting has escalated to professional athlete levels, a dozen people who have been involved in recruiting AI researchers told newsinpo.site.
“The AI labs approach hiring like a game of chess,” said Ariel Herbert-Voss, CEO of cybersecurity startup RunSybil and a former OpenAI researcher who entered the talent fight after launching his own company. “They want to move as fast as possible, so they are willing to pay a lot for candidates with specialized and complementary expertise, much like the game pieces. They are like, do I have enough rooks? Enough knights?”
Companies including OpenAI and Google, eager to get or stay ahead in the race to create the best AI models, court these so-called “ICs” – the individual contributors whose work can make or break companies.
Noam Brown, one of the researchers behind OpenAI’s recent AI breakthroughs in complex math and science reasoning, said when he explored job opportunities in 2023, he found himself being courted by tech’s elite: lunch with Google founder Sergey Brin, poker at Sam Altman’s, and a private jet visit from an eager investor. Elon Musk will also make calls to close candidates for xAI, his AI company, said two people who have spoken to him. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Ultimately, Brown said, he chose OpenAI because OpenAI was willing to put resources – both people and compute – behind the work he was excited about.
“It wasn’t really the most financially advantageous choice,” he stated, noting that financial rewards aren’t the top priority for numerous scientists. However, this has not prevented firms from offering multimillion-dollar incentives and salary packages to prominent researchers, as confirmed by seven insiders knowledgeable about these situations.
A few top OpenAI researchers who have indicated interest in joining former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new company, SSI, were offered retention bonuses of $2 million, in addition to equity increases of $20 million or more, if they stayed, two sources told newsinpo.site. Some have only been required to stay for a year in order to get the entire bonus. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment.
Other OpenAI researchers who have fielded offers from Eleven Labs have received bonuses of at least $1 million to stay at OpenAI, two sources told newsinpo.site. Top OpenAI researchers regularly receive compensation packages of over $10 million a year, sources said.
Google DeepMind has offered top researchers $20 million per year compensation packages, awarded off-cycle equity grants specifically to AI researchers, and has also reduced vesting on some stock packages to 3 years, instead of the normal 4 years, sources said. Google declined to comment.
In contrast, top engineers at big tech companies receive an average yearly compensation of $281,000 in salary and $261,000 in equity, according to Comprehensive.io, a company that tracks tech industry compensation.
10,000x TALENT
While talent has always been important in Silicon Valley, the difference with the AI boom is how few people are in this elite group – depending on who you ask, the number could range from a few dozen to around a thousand, eight sources told newsinpo.site.
That is based on the belief that this very small number of ‘ICs’ have made outsized contributions to the development of large language models, the technology today’s AI boom is based on, and therefore could make or break the success of an AI model.
“sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers…,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late 2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x) as effective as the average.
The September departure of OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, who then founded a rival AI startup, has intensified the AI talent war. Murati, who was known at OpenAI for her management skills and execution prowess, recruited 20 OpenAI employees before announcing her company in February. She has now lured even more researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now around 60 people, two sources told newsinpo.site. Though the company has no product in the market, Murati is in the middle of closing record-breaking seed round that is, based on the team’s strength. A representative for Murati declined to comment.
The lack of available talent has compelled businesses to adopt innovative approaches when recruiting. Zeki Data, an organization specializing in pinpointing exceptional AI professionals, mentioned they are utilizing data analytics methods from the sports sector—similar to those showcased in the film “Moneyball”—to uncover hidden gems. As an example, Zeki Data found out that Anthropic has been attracting researchers with experience in theoretical physics, while some other AI firms have recruited people skilled in quantum computing.
An anthropic entity did not respond to requests for commentary.
“I have incredibly skilled mathematicians on my team who would not have entered this field were it not for the rapid advancements we’re witnessing today,” explained Sébastien Bubeck, who transitioned from his position as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft to join OpenAI last year. “Currently, there’s a surge of talent entering AI from various disciplines. Some of these individuals are exceptionally brilliant and truly make a significant impact.”
(Reported by Anna Tong in San Francisco; edited by Kenneth Li and Claudia Parsons)
