Google has been known as Silicon Valley's "Whampoa Military School", but in recent years, it is in the field of AI talent drain is becoming more and more serious. Numerous departing Google AI scientists have created their own startups, and even spawned a number of leading companies in the field of AI. According to Forbes, in the past five years, at least seven AI researchers have left Google and then founded AI-related startups-OpenAIIlya Sutskever, co-founder of Anthropic; Dario Amodei and Christopher Olah, co-founders of Anthropic; Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, founders of Cohere, an enterprise-facing chatbot; Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, co-founders of customized chatbot Character.AI; Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani, co-founders of Adept; and Jakob Usob, co-founder of AI life science company Inceptive. AI; Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, co-founders of customized chatbot Character.AI; Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani, co-founders of Adept; and Jakob Uszkoreit, co-founder of Inceptive, an AI life sciences company, as well as Sakana AI's founder Llion Jones.
Google has set up a special stock compensation pool in the hopes of fighting off an onslaught to poach people at any cost and retaining top AI researchers, according to The Information, citing people familiar with the matter. Within DeepMind, Google's core division, a number of researchers working for Gemini have received restricted stock ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
Become the AI talent of choice forOpenAI
In the big model competition, OpenAI has become a "popular choice" for many Google employees.
According to Live Data Technologies, Google employees are the largest source of talent inflow to OpenAI from December 2022 to date, accounting for a staggering 7.51 TP3T of total inflows, well ahead of Stripe in second place and Meta in third.
Source: Live Data Technologies
Google's AI talent also contributed a lot to the birth of ChatGPT. According to The information, before ChatGPT was released, OpenAI poached five Google researchers to do pre-release optimization for the product.
△Source: OpenAI
Since last October, OpenAI has managed to recruit at least two mid-level managers from Google's Gemini team, overseeing dozens of employees. One of them is reportedly Jiahui Yu, who is in charge of multimodal model development, while the other is Amelia Glaese, Google's head of human data, who is responsible for overseeing how Google utilizes user feedback to refine its models.
Of course, OpenAI has been aggressively courting talent, and not only have these few been poached, but according to public LinkedIn profiles and people familiar with the matter, there are other researchers involved in the Gemini project who have been switching to OpenAI since last November, including Jonathan Uesato, Maja Tr bacz, Keren Gu- Lemberg and Tao Wang, among others.
However, to say that the most heavyweight talent Google sent to OpenAI, non-OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. As an important figure in the field of AI, his joining has undoubtedly brought a huge boost to OpenAI. This once again highlights OpenAI's pursuit and attraction for outstanding talent.
△Picture source: Ynetnews
In 2013, Sutskever joined Google Brain, during which time he created sequence-to-sequence learning algorithms with two other coworkers and participated in the development of the open source deep learning framework TensorFlow. It wasn't until 2015 that Ilya was tapped by Musk for OpenAI.
Musk has since gone on record as saying that the poaching was one of the toughest hiring battles he's ever experienced, and that he even went so far as to make a complete break with Google's founder in order to poach Ilya.
Ilya has certainly lived up to Musk's expectations. Since joining OpenAI, Ilya has played a key role in the development of large-scale language models, and has also pushed forward the development of GPT-2, GPT-3, and the Vincennes graph model DALL-E, and some people even believe that he should be called the 'father of ChatGPT'.
OpenAI's tradition of poaching, however, begins with current CEO Sam Altman, who published How to hire and Employee Retention back in 2013 and said that founders should spend one-third to one-half of their time on hiring.
Sam Altman also states directly in the article that really good people don't usually actively seek out jobs, so you need to poach the ones you're looking at. He also quotes a friend:
"Scooping is like fighting for your life in a Silicon Valley relationship."
When it comes to salaries, OpenAI is more than generous. According to data released in April 2023 by Rora, an overseas company that helps techies negotiate their salaries, OpenAI is the most generous employer when it comes to pay for employees working in AI, averaging a whopping $865,000 per employee per year.
△Source: AIM
According to this figure, OpenAI's salary for its employees is 251 TP3T higher than Google Brian's and 921 TP3T higher than Apple's. Therefore, apart from Google, there has been an exodus of talent from many established tech companies to OpenAI.
Last July, former FAIR (Facebook AI Research Institute) researcher Noam Brown announced that he was joining OpenAI, saying that he wanted to use the AI self-pairing and reasoning in games like poker and diplomacy, which he had been working on, for the optimization of large language models.
In addition, according to Bloomberg, Altman and Jony Ive recently teamed up to "pry away" Apple's VP of product design Tang Tan, who was previously head of design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, and who will be joining Jony Ive's startup In February, he will join Jony Ive's startup LoveFrom, which develops hardware in collaboration with OpenAI.
AI talentthe moment when supply exceeds demand
However, Silicon Valley's talent turnover is so rapid that even the notoriously well-paid Silicon Valley tech majors can't always keep the top talent.
Some people leave to start their own businesses, like siblings Dario and Daniela Amode, who were OpenAI's VP of R&D and VP of Security Policy. After OpenAI received a large investment from Microsoft, they decided that the company had strayed from its original vision and went out on their own to start Anthropic, which is now the second most influential startup in the industry after OpenAI.
Timothee Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, former Meta employees and authors of the Llama paper, have moved from "big models" to "small models" by co-founding the AI startup MistralAI, a stellar startup that recently received its latest round of funding at a valuation of $2 billion.
And tech majors, constrained by their legacy businesses and unable to pivot quickly, can also be a problemOn the one hand, it's true that big companies in Silicon Valley are more cautious because their every move is scrutinized by the media and the public. On the one hand, it is true that large companies in Silicon Valley are more cautious because their every move is under the scrutiny of the media and the public, and are far less free and flexible than smaller companies. At the same time, the more complex hierarchies within large companies, coupled with established and profitable businesses, result in large companies being far less able to capture and respond to market trends than AI startups with only a core team.
Some Google Brian employees have revealed that Google has been very cautious about AI internally in the past. As early as 2021, Google announced the creation of a large language model based on Transformer that can understand and generate conversations with humans, but due to the fear that the technology is not accurate enough, Google's internal hesitation to launch a chatbot is the main reason why Google can't retain employees who want to fulfill their ambitions.
Just days earlier, Diane Hirsh Theriault, a senior engineer at the company, criticized the company's executives for having "no vision" in a lengthy LinkedIn post.
△Photo source: LinkedIn
And, of course, there are the employees who are forced to leave because they can't stand the competition within the company.
More than half of the AI scientists among the 14 authors of the original research paper on Meta's Llama large model in February last year have left Meta. according to the analysis of foreign media, the main reason for the departure of the employees is the unequal distribution of the limited arithmetic resources within the company. The company's teams in Paris and the United States have been developing the Llama large model and the OPT model independently respectively, and the contradiction between the two teams ultimately led to the departure of Antoine Bordes, the head of the Paris team, to join the military AI company Helsing.
Additionally, having an unreliable leader at a company can accelerate employee turnover, such as Stability AI, which gained notoriety for Stable Diffusion.
In June of last year, more than 30 people, including former employees and investors, revealed a number of sins against the company's CEO, Emad Mostaque, including massive non-payment of wages to employees and the "theft" of their research. Under Emad Mostaque's leadership, more than a dozen Stability AI executives have left the company, and Forbes even predicted Stability AI's demise in its outlook for the AI industry in 2024.
This is the moment when the supply of AI talent in Silicon Valley exceeds the demand for it
Meta's CEO, Zuckerberg, expressed a similar sentiment in a recent interview with The Verge: the battle for AI talent is as fierce as ever, with every company competing for a very small number of researchers and engineers. Those with specialized skills can command jaw-dropping pay packages, and Zuckerberg himself is often directly involved in the hiring process.
That's the reason why, after OpenAI's management change, Microsoft cut its own employees' bonuses and stock while also biting the bullet and bringing in the employees who left OpenAI en masse at their original high salaries. Also waiting in the wings early are Anthropic, Adept, Cohere, Replit, and a host of other AI startups.
Retaining employees with a sense of mission and growth
In addition to the above, the absence of non-compete agreements in Silicon Valley is a major reason why employees are able to move so freely.
On the one hand, California, where Silicon Valley is located, legislated against non-compete agreements in 1872, and in January 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a statement that it intends to prohibit non-compete clauses between employers and their employees on a nationwide basis. On the other hand, tech companies have a high level of confidentiality within their ranks, and employees who steal trade secrets are subject to legal sanctions.
Historically, Silicon Valley has seen a freer flow of talent, although the big companies used to agree with each other not to cut corners and were sued by the U.S. Department of Justice in the name of monopolization.
So what can companies do to retain their core employees?
Sam Altman's thinking may be worthwhile, after all, when he was kicked out of the company by the board of directors, prompting a group of employees to resign en masse to join him.
In his article, "Retaining Employees," he suggests three main approaches:
sense of mission
Altman argues that if employees work because they believe in the company's mission, they're less likely to be lured by higher salaries offered by other companies and less likely to be eager to leave to start their own business.
rapid growth
The rapid growth of the company's business means that everyone is constantly faced with new challenges and is able to provide employees with an expectation of wealth freedom by granting them equity (something that can never be achieved with a salary alone).
Excellent working environment
Altman believes in defining cultural values early on and maintaining them over time. At the same time, never compromise in the first ten hires because great people always want to work with other great people.
In response to OpenAI's onslaught, Google is now focusing on retaining employees through stock and salary increases, the effects of which are yet to be seen, but the added pressure on the company's payroll expenses is real. in Q3 2023, Google's unallocated corporate costs, the vast majority of which come from DeepMind, jumped by nearly $40%, to $1.6 billion. Meanwhile, Google has been limiting hiring over the past year and recently laid off more than 1,000 employees, with the savings going back to make up for the rising cost of AI talent.
The good news is that Google, becoming generous, did poach employees from OpenAI in reverse as well. An AI engineer named Matt Wiethoff said on LinkedIn that he jumped ship to Google starting last October, after leading the development of a popular ChatGPT feature called Code Interpreter that automates data analysis.
However, it remains to be tested whether this strategy will be effective in the long term.
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