Tech companies are doing everything they can to hire top talent in the field of artificial intelligence, with billionaire moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin trying to convince candidates to work for them. So much so that I have personal contact with them.
Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta Platforms Inc., sent a personally written memo to AI researchers at DeepMind, a research lab owned by technology rival Google. They want Facebook’s parent company to recruit them. According to a report in The Information magazine.
Brin, a fellow billionaire who made his fortune as a co-founder of the search engine Google, personally called employees who were about to leave at OpenAI and persuaded them to stay by offering them pay increases and other perks. The technology news site reported that.
It is unclear when the call came. The Post has reached out to Brin and Zuckerberg for comment.
According to the report, Meta has extended job offers without interviewing candidates and relaxed its long-standing company policy of not increasing the pay of internal employees who threaten to leave for a competitor. The company is said to be aiming to acquire AI talent.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal lobbying, which is considered unusual considering the employee’s status, has borne fruit.
Last week, Michal Valko, a senior engineer at DeepMind, announced he was defecting to Meta to take up a role as lead engineer for LlaMA, Meta’s AI-powered large-scale language model.
In a social media post, Valko praised Zuckerberg’s pitch and said he thanked the Facebook founder “hugely for his very personal involvement.”
In one of X’s posts, Valko even referred to the billionaire CEO by his first name, “Mark.”
Meta is considered a laggard in Silicon Valley when it comes to how tech companies pay coveted AI researchers.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI reportedly pays its best new hires compensation packages of $5 million to $10 million, mostly in the form of stock, while Zuckerberg’s store offers His annual income is said to be relatively low, ranging from $1 million to $2 million.
a Wall Street Journal report Citing data from Levels.fyi, we found that the median compensation for Meta’s 344 machine learning and AI engineers was nearly $400,000 annually, including bonuses and stock.
While tech companies are cutting jobs in non-AI departments, they’re increasing offers to engineers who can help develop the know-how behind chatbots and language models.
According to the magazine, some companies are offering seven-figure salaries to members of entire engineering teams in hopes of encouraging them to defect en masse.
The median salary of the six candidates considered for a job with OpenAI was $925,000, including bonus and capital.
Justin Kinsey, president of a chip recruiting firm, said he recently convinced an AI engineering manager who was making more than $1 million in bonuses and stock to leave Microsoft for a job at a startup with a base salary of $100,000 less. .
Kinsey told the Journal that the engineering manager received stock options, which he expects to one day be worth $40 million.
