作者 | Katherine Bindley
Translator | Nuka-Cola
Curated | Li Dongmei
Tech giants continue to lay off employees, and top AI talent is in short supply
The boom in artificial intelligence is pushing the war for talent in Silicon Valley to new heights.
Tech giants have poached entire engineering teams with multimillion-dollar annual compensation packages and shorter-life stock cash-out plans to attract valuable talent with expertise and experience in generative AI like ChatGPT and other humanoid robots. The giants compete with each other, and even directly fight with start-ups, which is quite a taste of "Qin loses its deer, and the world chases it".
While the tech industry has long been known for its relatively lucrative compensation and benefits packages, the current poaching conditions are staggering compared to the past. Another factor contributing to this AI talent shortage is that the tech industry is still laying off workers in other directions, and companies are focusing on reallocating the resources they have saved and investing more to compensate for the huge costs of AI technology development. Under the boom, the value of AI talents has also risen.
Naveen Rao, Head of Generative AI at Databricks, said, "The type of talent we're looking for is changing over the long term. On the one hand, the company has a surplus of manpower, and on the other hand, there is a shortage of talent. ”
Databricks, a data storage and management startup, is currently well on its way to hiring software engineers. But when it comes to people who need to train large language models (LLMs) from scratch or have the ability to solve complex problems in the AI space, such as "hallucinations," Rao admits that there are probably only a few hundred people in the market who meet the requirements.
Those candidates with strong business skills can easily earn a combined salary of millions of dollars or more per year.
Sales talent in AI is also in high demand, but it's hard to find. In the early stages of technology transformation, factors can change rapidly, and salespeople need a rich skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with these skills can earn about twice as much as a traditional enterprise software salesperson. But Rao says this kind of enthusiasm isn't the norm for most AI practitioners.
According to a survey of more than 1,500 employers by WTW Consulting, from April 2022 to April 2023, the base salary for managerial positions in AI and machine learning increased by 5% to 11%, while the base salary for non-managerial positions increased by 13% to 19% over the same period.
Celebrity AI startups are more attractive than tech giants
Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of Levels.fyi, said that the average salary of the six candidates who consulted with OpenAI for job offers on the career service platform was $925,000, including bonuses and equity. He added that Meta's 344 machine and AI engineers revealed to Levels.fyi that their median annual salary is close to $400,000, which also includes bonuses and equity.
Scott Chetham, CEO of Faro Health, which uses AI to help pharmaceutical companies improve drug trial efficiency, says its goal is to keep this talent in the top 25% of the industry's overall compensation. Although 2023 will be difficult to achieve due to extremely high pay, he sees signs of improvement in 2024. "While it's too early to tell, things seem to be better than expected," Chetham said. ”
Chetham's company was recently looking for a candidate from a consulting industry giant and offered her an offer. The company hit back by doubling wages outright. The candidate said that the company's direct doubling of wages made her angry because it meant that it should have paid her a higher salary.
In order to retain its own talent, Chetham has also increased the amount of equity incentives for top talent. Their first shares in the company will be implemented within four years, but they will receive another share within just two years of their employment, which will be implemented five years later.
He explains, "We have to keep renewing our equity to keep our employees motivated. ”
Although the base salary of startups is often lower than that of big tech companies, many employees who tend to go the entrepreneurial route believe that they can achieve more with their own efforts here. Arthur Mensch, a former Google employee, left the company and founded Mistral AI, a start-up that has been valued at more than $2 billion less than a year ago.
An AI researcher at Google said that he has been approached regularly by recruiters for the past five years, but this has started to increase significantly recently.
The researcher pointed out that he didn't choose to jump to a start-up because very few young companies have the money they need to train large language models. Large language models are machine learning algorithms trained on massive amounts of text and are responsible for powering AI applications. The researcher explained that Google has the resources he needs, and more importantly, he cares more about whether the work itself is interesting and whether it can push AI technology further. Unlike many of his colleagues, he recently received an additional bonus in the form of an additional stake.
used to poach people with high salaries, but now they pry away the whole team
Justin Kinsey, president of SBT Industries, a recruitment firm for the semiconductor industry, said employers often need a variety of strengths to win over candidates, including higher pay, a more compelling corporate mission, and a generous commitment to provide job autonomy.
He said he recently hired an engineering manager from Microsoft for an AI hardware startup. Kinsey explained that the candidate gave up more than $1 million in bonuses and Microsoft stock, and was even willing to join the startup at the cost of a $100,000 drop in base salary, because he had confidence in the company's CEO. Kinsey noted that over the next five to seven years, the new employee expects to earn $40 million in stock alone.
And when it came time to solicit another candidate, the two sides reached a verbal commitment. As long as the tech guru helped the company build its first chip, he could be tasked with launching a new product line.
Competition for talent in chip development, the hardware foundation necessary to train large language models, is so fierce that four customers have asked Kinsey to poach entire engineering teams from competitors over the past year, primarily to maintain a good understanding among team members and prevent valuable time from being wasted during collaborative break-in periods.
"Our customers asked us to recruit technical teams in an organized way so that talent could be plug-and-play and eliminate the steep adaptation curves," he says. ”
In the face of the hot demand, technicians with no AI experience are eager to add this part of their expertise to their resumes. Caroline Pennartz, spokesperson for the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the school recently hosted a four-day executive training program in San Francisco called "Generative AI and Business Transformation." Despite the costing up to $12,000, the 50 spots filled up quickly.
Alexis Roucourt, who previously worked at Meta and now works as a consultant, said many of his peers in the tech world have noticed that there are more and more jobs in the market that require AI knowledge. Only by grasping this technology can we attract the attention of employers and keep up with the pace of development. He knows several employees who are upskilling and looking to take advantage of AI developments and bolster their resumes.
"I'm the same myself, and I'm currently taking a course on AI technology. ”
Original link:New employees earn at least 200 million yuan in 5 years after joining the company, poaching people before and now pry the whole team, and the AI company grabs people and then escalates the war for talents!_Generative AI_InfoQ Selected articles