Recruitment of AI researchers grabs attention in US

The contest in Silicon Valley to dominate artificial intelligence is playing out on a new court: superstar researchers.

While the scramble to attract top talent and keep them happy has always been a hallmark of the tech industry, since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, recruiting has escalated to professional athlete levels, a dozen people who have been involved in recruiting AI researchers told Reuters.

“The AI labs approach hiring like a game of chess,” said Ariel Herbert-Voss, CEO of cybersecurity startup RunSybil and a former OpenAI researcher who entered the talent fight after launching his own company. “They want to move as fast as possible, so they are willing to pay a lot for candidates with specialised and complementary expertise, much like the game pieces. They are like, do I have enough rooks? Enough knights?”

Companies including OpenAI and Google, eager to get or stay ahead in the race to create the best AI models, court these so-called “ICs” – the individual contributors whose work can make or break companies.

Noam Brown, one of the researchers behind OpenAI’s recent AI breakthroughs in complex maths and science reasoning, said when he explored job opportunities in 2023, he found himself being courted by tech’s elite: lunch with Google founder Sergey Brin, poker at Sam Altman’s, and a private jet visit from an eager investor. Elon Musk will also make calls to close candidates for xAI, his AI company, said two people who have spoken to him, according to Reuters.

Ultimately, Brown said, he chose OpenAI because OpenAI was willing to put resources – both people and compute – behind the work he was excited about. “It was actually financially not the best option that I had,” he said, explaining that compensation is not the most important thing for many researchers. That hasn’t stopped companies from throwing millions of dollars in bonuses and pay packages at star researchers, according to seven sources familiar with the matter. A few top OpenAI researchers who have indicated interest in joining former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever’s new company, SSI, were offered retention bonuses of $2 million, in addition to equity increases of $20 million or more, if they stayed, two sources told Reuters. Some have only been required to stay for a year in order to get the entire bonus. Other OpenAI researchers who have fielded offers from Eleven Labs have received bonuses of at least $1 million to stay at OpenAI, two sources told Reuters. Top OpenAI researchers regularly receive compensation packages of over $10 million a year, sources said.

Google DeepMind has offered top researchers $20 million per year compensation packages, awarded off-cycle equity grants specifically to AI researchers, and has also reduced vesting on some stock packages to 3 years, instead of the normal 4 years, sources said. Google declined to comment. In contrast, top engineers at big tech companies receive an average yearly compensation of $281,000 in salary and $261,000 in equity, according to Comprehensive.io, a company that tracks tech industry compensation.

While talent has always been important in Silicon Valley, the difference with the AI boom is how few people are in this elite group – depending on who you ask, the number could range from a few dozen to around a thousand, eight sources told Reuters.

That is based on the belief that this very small number of ‘ICs’ have made outsized contributions to the development of large language models, the technology today’s AI boom is based on, and therefore could make or break the success of an AI model. The September departure of OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, who then founded a rival AI startup, has intensified the AI talent war. Murati, who was known at OpenAI for her management skills and execution prowess, recruited 20 OpenAI employees before announcing her company in February.