The battle for reaching the next AI milestone / product is turning out to be fiercer by the day and primarily depends on the talent you have. Meta started it all, and the scramble for talent does not seem to end. Till sometime back, the best of the tech products in human history have been made by inhouse talent of the company concerned and there was no buzz or hype about talent acquisition. It has never happened at industrial scale as is being witnessed in the nascent stage of the AI revolution.
The pace of the tech development and delivery has grown manifold in the AI age, losing time is losing the battle. Calling the financial returns as windfall would also be an understatement. Besides, the ones cracking it would be known in history as the real tech changemakers, redefining the way we live, think and work. Meta felt it had become a laggard in this case and hence went ahead on a talent acquisition spree in an unprecedented manner. The signing bonus and compensation promised has broken all glass ceilings.
The amounts being offered across board; Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI to hire AI geniuses is mind boggling as the fight is over a tiny talent pool in their race to achieve the next breakthrough. At the current tech crossroad, the cutthroat competition is not likely to ebb anytime soon. If you go by the economic value this talent pool creates in comparison to the spending on compute, then maybe, the market may continue to stay like this. This group, all the big AI behemoths, feel know how to discover the remaining ideas to get to superintelligence.
At the end of the day there are going to be a handful of algorithmic ideas and only a handful of people who can figure them out and hence the astronomical amounts companies are willing to spend to poach AI talent, with an offer reportedly topping $1 billion. Meta has indulged in lots of giant offers with some totaling $100 million signing bonuses and more than that in compensation per year. Meta has also invested $14.3 billion in Scale and hired the startup’s CEO, Alexandr’ Wang, for the superintelligence team. Altman says whilst immense fortunes are being thrown at a handful of top engineers, he feels that the estimated number of people smart enough to make superintelligence breakthroughs are actually much, much higher.
BEFORE SUPERINTELLIGENCE, SUPER TALENT WITH SUPER MONEY ARE ALREADY RULING THE ROOST.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.