Another day and another spicy development in the AI talent wars!
Meta Platform’s (META) Scale AI deal kicked the AI talent war into overdrive, and other tech giants are following suit.
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It’s an AI hiring spree, and some of the finest tech talent could rake in record-breaking AI research salaries.
Lately, if a tech giant misses the boat, that’s essentially letting Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook fortune write checks to poach their best generative AI talent.
Needless to say, the scramble is only getting more ruthless.
The escalating AI talent war
Over the past few months, we’ve seen the hunt for the top AI researchers and engineers has turned into a full-blown AI talent war.
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Big tech has been itching for what seems like a small pool of people who can push generative models, large language systems, and next-gen AI forward.
Breakthrough AI, including lifelike chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok, has made it crucial to lock down top talent fast.
Meta, in particular, has been especially aggressive in chasing top AI talent.
Just this month, it snagged three senior researchers from OpenAI’s Zurich lab, including Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, and Xiaohua Zhai.
This comes just weeks after CEO Sam Altman blasted Meta for offering nine-figure offers to poach his team.
Meanwhile, Meta locked in a massive deal with Scale AI, dropping $14.8 billion for a 49% nonvoting stake.
More importantly, that deal gives Meta direct access to Scale’s 28-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, to help turn its artificial general intelligence dream into a reality.
The massive Scale AI acquisition underscored the importance of valuable, top-notch, human-labeled data.
Meta’s big bet highlights that owning the data pipeline matters; it could potentially gain a decisive edge in building those flashy generative AI models.
Meta’s moves have already shaken up the whole tech space.
Google’s looking to cut ties with Scale to keep Meta out of its training secrets, and Microsoft’s bringing in its data labeling in-house.
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Even startups like Anthropic and xAI are looking to scoop up the best talent in competing against the big guys.
Amazon’s AWS faces fresh questions after key AI exec exits
According to a Reuters report, Vasi Philomin, a vice president of generative AI at Amazon (AMZN) , has left the company. Philomin told Reuters he’s headed to another company without any specifics.
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Philomin was one of the major forces behind Amazon Titan and Bedrock, spending eight years shaping strategy.
These pillars have become critical in Amazon Web Services’ push to make AI plug-and-play for any customer.
Moreover, he also helped the tech giant launch Nova for multimodal tasks and Sonic for lifelike speech, keeping pace with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok.
He also helped plug Anthropic’s Claude (from Amazon’s $8 billion Anthropic investment) into Alexa, showing off Amazon’s powerful playbook.
Philomin’s exit comes at a time when the top AI talent turns into tech’s priciest prize.
The top tech leaders are reportedly using sports-style scouting to find hidden talent and dropping $100 million signing bonuses to attract talent.
For Amazon, losing one of its key AI architects is a big wake-up call.
Despite pouring billions into big-name deals and research efforts, Amazon is at risk of its rivals snapping up its generative AI talent.
Though Rajesh Sheth (formerly of Elastic Block Store) is already handling the bulk of Philomin’s work, the need for a deep bench of AI leaders ready to shape models, products, and strategy is as imperative as ever.
Big picture? Philomin’s move is just another sign that the top minds in the AI space hold all the cards right now.
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