NY.- The rise of artificial intelligence is taking the talent wars in Silicon Valley to new extremes, according to information published by The Wall Street Journal.
Tech companies are offering multimillion-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock acquisition schedules, and offers to hack entire engineering teams to attract people with expertise in the kind of generative AI behind ChatGPT and other human-like bots. . They are competing with each other and with startups looking to be the next big thing to unseat the giants.
The deals stand out even under the industry’s relatively lavish standards of excessive salaries and benefits in the past. And the current AI talent shortage stands out for another reason: It comes as layoffs continue in other areas of technology and companies have been reallocating resources to invest more in covering the enormous cost of developing AI technology.
“There is a shift in the talent we are looking for,” says Naveen Rao, director of generative AI at Databricks. “We have an excess of people, on the one hand, and a shortage on the other.”
Databricks, a data management and storage startup, has no problem finding software engineers. But when it comes to candidates who have trained large language models, or LLMs, from scratch, or who can help solve perplexing problems in AI, such as hallucinations, Rao says there might be only a couple hundred qualified people.
Some of these top-tier, hard-to-find candidates can easily command total compensation packages of $1 million per year or more.
Vendors in AI are also in demand and hard to find. Selling at the dawn of a technological transition, when things are changing rapidly, requires a different skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with those skills earn about twice what an enterprise software salesperson would earn.
Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of Levels.fyi, says the average salary of six candidates who had consulted the professional services platform about OpenAI job offers was $925,000, including bonuses and stocks. The average compensation of 344 machine learning and artificial intelligence engineers at Meta who disclosed their salaries to Levels.fyi was almost $400,000 a year, including bonuses and stocks, he added.
Scott Chetham, CEO of Faro Health, which uses AI to help pharmaceutical companies design more efficient clinical trials of drugs, aims to keep salaries in the top 25% of what companies in the sector pay. Until 2023, that was difficult to achieve due to extremely high outliers, but now you are seeing signs of softening this year. “It’s early, but it’s not as bad as it was,” Chetham said.
To retain his talent, Chetham has added more stock incentives for his best employees. Their first set of shares in the company vest over four years, but after two years they get another grant of shares that begins to vest after five years.
“We have to continue renewing to keep people motivated,” he says.
While base pay tends to be lower at startups than at big tech companies, some employees with entrepreneurial instincts are betting they can make a bigger footprint by working for themselves. Arthur Mensch, a former Google employee, left the company to launch the startup Mistral AI and, less than a year old, it is already valued at just over $2 billion.
An AI researcher at Google says he has been approached regularly by recruiters over the past five years, but that has increased significantly recently.
The researcher indicates that he has not been tempted by opportunities in startups because very few have the necessary funds to train LLMs, the machine learning algorithms trained with mountains of text that drive artificial intelligence programs. Google has the resources it needs, and it also cares that the work itself is interesting and promotes AI for good, he says. And unlike many of his co-workers, he says, he recently received additional stock as a bonus.
Justin Kinsey, president of a semiconductor recruiting firm, notes that candidates can be won over by a number of factors, from compensation to being a true believer in a startup’s mission to being promised autonomy over their work.
He noted that he recently hired an engineering manager for an artificial intelligence hardware startup from Microsoft. The candidate turned his back on more than $1 million in bonuses and Microsoft stock, and took a $100,000 cut in his base salary to join the startup, Kinsey said, because the candidate had enormous trust in the CEO. executive. In five to seven years, the recruit anticipates he will make $40 million from the stock alone, Kinsey says.
With another candidate, what sealed the deal was a verbal promise that the person could start an entirely new product line once they completed manufacturing the company’s first chip.
The race to build chips – the hardware needed to train large language models – is so intense that Kinsey had four clients last year asking him to hack entire competing engineering teams to reduce the time it takes to build a new team. collaborate well together.
“We’ve been asked to actually help with the removal of the equipment,” he says. “They could set them up and get to work, and that eliminates a steep learning curve.”
Tech workers who don’t have AI experience are looking to add it to their resumes. When the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School recently held a four-day executive education program in San Francisco called Generative AI and Business Transformation for $12,000, the 50 available spots filled up very quickly, notes Caroline Pennartz, a spokesperson for Wharton.
Alexis Roucourt, who previously worked at Meta and is currently a consultant, mentions that many of his tech worker friends are noticing the growing number of positions that require AI knowledge. He has been causing concern and a race to catch up. Several workers he knows are upskilling to stay on top of trends in AI and expand their resumes.
“And I include myself,” he says. “I’m taking a course on AI.”
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