Wizards, not workers, win AI's talent lottery
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The bidding war for top AI talent masks a deepening crisis in the broader market for tech skills.
The big picture: You'll never get a billion-dollar job offer from Mark Zuckerberg if you're not a top AI expert. And even if you are, you're still not getting one unless you're among the tiny handful of researchers who've built the massive models at AI's frontier edge.
- Big Tech's bottomless checkbook is open for a select few because AI's leaders see themselves in a race to superintelligence. Whoever wins will dominate the world, they believe — so when it comes to hiring winning players, they just keep adding more zeros.
Driving the news: Zuckerberg's epic efforts to lure talent from AI startups and rivals like Apple have involved eye-popping compensation packages.
- The Meta CEO offered one prospect, Andrew Tulloch, a billion-dollar package "worth as much as $1.5 billion over at least six years," the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.
- Tulloch's offer was part of a larger raid to hire key players from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, which is full of exiles from OpenAI. None have taken the bait.
- Zuckerberg has had more success poaching leading researchers directly from OpenAI and from Apple's foundation models team, which has faltered in efforts to catch up with rivals.
How it works: No one, not even Zuckerberg, is writing checks to new hires for a billion in cash.
- Meta's offers to elite researchers — more typically in the tens of millions than in the billion-dollar stratosphere, per the New York Times — are likely to come with generous salaries. But the bulk of the money involves a complex payout of stock options over time.
- The actual value depends on how the company's stock price fares.
Between the lines: The twist with stock options is that you want to receive them when the company's stock is hurting, so you can profit from a future rise.
- Meta's stock has been on a roll — up about 28% year to date and hitting an all-time high last week.
- Paradoxically, that's bad for a new recruit: It means that today's options could be worthless if the stock falls below the price at the time of hire, leaving the options "underwater."
Zoom out: While no one is likely to turn down a Zuckerberg-style offer without giving it a careful look, many top researchers are driven less by dollars than by a sense of mission and a yearning to be the first to solve a hard problem.
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alluded to this dynamic in an internal memo, vowing that "missionaries will beat mercenaries."
- "Meta has gotten a few great people for sure, but on the whole, it is hard to overstate how much they didn't get their top people and had to go quite far down their list." Altman wrote, per Wired. He predicted "very deep cultural problems" at Meta stemming from its recruiting blitz and fat contracts.
The best researchers are also attracted by the opportunity to pursue their interests and hunches without distraction from an employer's more humdrum needs around products and profits.
- OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever launched his Safe Superintelligence startup last year with the declaration that "our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles" and a promise that researchers would be "insulated from short-term commercial pressures."
- Sutskever reportedly turned down a Zuckerberg offer.
The other side: Anyone working on advanced AI today needs access to ever more powerful server clusters powered by ever more expensive chips.
- The money for all those data centers has to come from somewhere, and the investors who are ponying up now will eventually demand a profitable return.
Flashback: This isn't AI's first talent war, and it won't be the last.
- A decade ago, the first industry frenzy over the advent of machine learning sparked another recruiting fight.
- The tech industry saw similar hiring sprees in the 1990s, when internet networking specialists could write their own tickets, and again in the 2000s, when experts in wireless and phone technologies were in demand.
Limited supply is always the key driver of tech's talent wars.
- You can't get an AI Ph.D. overnight, and there are only so many in the world right now.
- There are even fewer from elite universities, and even fewer who have actually built the most advanced models.
Anywhere below this stratosphere, however, the tech job market looks very different.
- Software veterans are wondering how long their experience will be valuable in an AI-dominated industry, while recent graduates fear entry-level jobs are disappearing.
The bottom line: For AI makers who plan to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure to support "superintelligence," spending a few more billion for a handful of human brains looks perfectly reasonable.
