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Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai
As the talent war in the AI sector intensifies, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has opened up about aggressive recruitment tactics of tech rivals like Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI to lure top AI experts away from Google's DeepMind division by offering attractive compensation packages.
Sundar Pichai talks about rivals poaching Google employees
Pichai has finally broken his silence to address concerns about high-profile employee exits from the company’s AI research division.
During Alphabet’s Q2 earnings call, Pichai said, “I do know individual cases can make headlines, but when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing well through this moment.”
He also mentioned that the company’s internal metrics on both employee retention and new talent acquisition are ‘healthy.’
As reported by Business Insider, analysts such as Bernstein’s Mark Shmulik raised concerns about the increasing costs of staying ahead in the race of AI innovation.
A recent report by SignalFire revealed that researchers are 11 times more likely to leave Google for Anthropic.
Sundar Pichai, however, said that retaining the top talent is not all about offering huge compensation packages.
“Access to compute is super important,” he said, referencing Google’s investment in cutting-edge chips and infrastructure. “Researchers want to be at the frontier driving progress… the mission and how state-of-the-art the work is matter.”
Currently, the AI sector is noticing the best talent and luring them with exceptional compensation packages.
Reportedly, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offering industry-leading salary packages to top AI researchers for creating the Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Tech giants Microsoft and OpenAI have also made headlines for poaching employees from rivals to further their lead and stay ahead of the race.
Interestingly, Google’s India team ended up poaching one of its techies for a role in the same office.
As mentioned on their web page, Google DeepMind is a team of scientists, engineers, ethicists and more, committed to solving intelligence, to advance science and benefit humanity.
"By solving some of the hardest scientific and engineering challenges of our time, we’re working to create breakthrough technologies that could advance science, transform work, serve diverse communities — and improve billions of people’s lives," states the official page of Google DeepMind.