Silicon Valley's Billion-Dollar Battle for AI Talent Intensifies

OpenAI, Google and xAI battle for superstar AI talent, shelling out millions

SAN FRANCISCO, May 21 (Reuters) - 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 specialized 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 math 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. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. 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. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment. 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. 10,000x TALENT 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. "sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers...," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late 2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x) as effective as the average. 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. She has now lured even more researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now around 60 people, two sources told Reuters. Though the company has no product in the market, Murati is in the middle of closing a record-breaking seed round that is, based on the team's strength. A representative for Murati declined to comment. The scarcity of talent has forced companies to approach hiring creatively. Zeki Data, a data firm focused on identifying top AI talent , said it is employing sports industry data analysis techniques like the one popularized by the movie "Moneyball" to identify promising but undiscovered talent. For instance, Zeki Data discovered Anthropic has been hiring researchers with theoretical physics backgrounds, and other AI companies have hired individuals with quantum computing backgrounds. Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment. "On my team, I have extraordinarily talented mathematicians who wouldn't have come to this field if it weren't for the fast progress that we're seeing now," said Sébastien Bubeck, who left, opens new tab his role as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft last year to join OpenAI. "We're seeing an influx of talent from all fields going into AI now. And some of these people are very, very clever, and they make a difference." Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Claudia Parsons Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Anna Tong Thomson Reuters Anna Tong is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where she reports on the technology industry. She joined Reuters in 2023 after working at the San Francisco Standard as a data editor. Tong previously worked at technology startups as a product manager and at Google where she worked in user insights and helped run a call center. Tong graduated from Harvard University. Kenrick Cai Thomson Reuters Kenrick Cai is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco. He covers Google, its parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence. Cai joined Reuters in 2024. He previously worked at Forbes magazine, where he was a staff writer covering venture capital and startups. He received a Best in Business award from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing in 2023. He is a graduate of Duke University.

How Anthropic Is Snatching Top Talent from OpenAI and DeepMind | AIM

Anthropic is reportedly preparing to launch its first employee share buyback programme. The AI industry is in the middle of a cutthroat talent war, with tech giants and startups competing fiercely for top researchers, engineers, and executives. This has led to aggressive poaching, multimillion-dollar compensation packages, and growing regulatory scrutiny. According to a recent report by SignalFire, Anthropic has become a major destination for talent departing OpenAI and DeepMind. Engineers are eight times more likely to exit OpenAI for Anthropic and nearly eleven times more likely to leave DeepMind for the same. The report also analysed retention rates across top AI labs, with Anthropic emerging as the leader. Nearly 80% of people who joined Anthropic two years ago still worked there, which is relatively rare in AI, where job-hopping is common. DeepMind isn't far behind at 78%. OpenAI's retention is lower at 67%, followed by Meta's 64%. Meanwhile, Anthropic is reportedly preparing to launch its first employee share buyback programme. As per The Information, the company intends to repurchase shares from both current and former employees at a $61.5 billion valuation. This matches its recent $3.5 billion Series E funding round. The move would give employees a chance to cash out some equity while helping Anthropic retain top talent. Such employee liquidity initiatives are becoming increasingly common in the AI sector. By allowing early share sales, startups try to keep their teams motivated without relying solely on high compensation packages. AIM spoke with Deedy Das from Menlo Ventures about what drives talent to switch companies. He said, "The biggest factor is total comp (with equity). No one wants to talk about that, but that's the main reason people switch. 7-figure (a salary of one million dollars or more per year) offers are very common for specialised skills." It's not just about the numbers. Some of the biggest names in AI are making the jump. Sholto Douglas joined Anthropic in March after previously working at Google DeepMind. He had recently appeared on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel and predicted that by 2027-28, AI will likely automate nearly every white-collar job. Niki Parmar, a former Google AI researcher and co-author of the groundbreaking 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, recently joined Anthropic. Earlier this year, Neil Houlsby, a former research scientist and manager at Google DeepMind, was brought on to lead Anthropic's new Zurich office. Pavel Izmailov, who worked on reasoning and safety at OpenAI, joined Anthropic after reportedly being dismissed from OpenAI. Jan Leike, who previously co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team, also moved to Anthropic in May last year, citing concerns that OpenAI was prioritising "shiny products" over building a strong safety culture. Das stated that there is a shortage of talent because the knowledge required to train models at scale is not really taught in schools. It is primarily possessed by the few individuals who have experience in it. "It costs money to train models, and most people in university don't even have access to the hardware to do it. Most of the academic models are small." Big tech companies are doing everything they can to retain employees and prevent them from leaving. A recent report reveals that Google DeepMind is enforcing non-compete agreements that bar some UK-based staff from joining rival firms for up to a year after they leave. The restrictions vary, depending on employees' roles and seniority levels. While six-month non-competes are common for individual contributors, some senior researchers have been subject to agreements lasting as long as 12 months. In certain cases, employees have been placed on extended garden leave, where they continue receiving pay but are no longer actively working at DeepMind. Moreover, in a bid to retain top talent, DeepMind is shelling out annual compensation packages of up to $20 million, introducing unscheduled equity awards, and shortening stock vesting timelines from four years to three. Google has recently been able to make impactful hires. Tim Brooks, who co-led the team behind OpenAI's video model Sora, left the company in October 2024. He's now at Google DeepMind, working on video generation and world simulation. Logan Kilpatrick, who was in charge of developer relations at OpenAI, has also moved to Google. He now leads product for Google AI Studio and the Gemini Developer API at DeepMind. Since his arrival, Google has seen a major boost, especially with the success of its Gemini 2.5 models. Meanwhile, Microsoft is allowing managers to request retention bonuses for employees they believe are too valuable to lose. According to a recent report, the process involves filling out forms that include questions such as, "What harm is done if the employee leaves Microsoft?" The document instructs managers, "In the context of AI transformation as a key priority, please indicate if this individual is critical AI talent and share the risk to the AI initiative(s) if the talent is not retained." The global AI talent pool is limited, with only a few thousand researchers capable of developing advanced models such as ChatGPT or Gemini. This competition extends beyond big tech, as research labs and startups are also aggressively recruiting. One of the most striking departures was Mira Murati, who left her position as OpenAI's chief technology officer in September 2024 to start her own AI venture. She didn't go alone; she brought around 20 OpenAI employees with her and later expanded the team to 60 by hiring from OpenAI and other AI labs. At the same time, a few leading OpenAI researchers interested in joining former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's new firm, SSI (Safe Superintelligence), were reportedly offered retention bonuses of $2 million, along with equity increases exceeding $20 million, if they remained at OpenAI, according to Reuters. Interestingly, some of them only needed to commit to staying for a year to receive the full bonus. Neither SSI nor OpenAI has commented on the matter. Meanwhile, Reuters reported that other OpenAI researchers considering offers from Eleven Labs were given retention bonuses of at least $1 million to stay put. High-level researchers at OpenAI are said to regularly receive compensation packages exceeding $10 million annually. However, that doesn't mean OpenAI isn't hiring from rivals. In December last year, the company brought in three AI researchers -- Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Xiaohua Zhai -- from Google DeepMind, all of whom specialise in computer vision and machine learning. Most recently, Tim Zaman from Google DeepMind joined OpenAI to work on frontier clusters. Since early 2024, at least 44 former Google employees, half of them engineers, have joined OpenAI, with a total of 85 making the switch over the past 18 months. The company also brought in Karan Singhal, who now leads health research at OpenAI. He led the team that recently launched HealthBench. Before that, he worked on medical foundational models at Google. Big-tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are using different tactics to attract top AI talent. One standard method is pseudo-acquisition, where they hire key employees and license technology from AI startups without actually buying the companies. For instance, Google brought in Noam Shazeer along with much of the Character.AI team. Microsoft hired several people from Inflection, including its founder, Mustafa Suleyman. Amazon did something similar in a deal with Adept, a generative AI startup. It hired most of the team and licensed the company's technology without a full acquisition. The practice has drawn antitrust scrutiny, with Senators Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren urging the FTC to investigate whether Big Tech is bypassing regulatory oversight by acquiring talent and technology from startups through informal deals. The US Justice Department is currently investigating whether Google's agreement with Character.AI violates antitrust laws and whether the deal gives the tech giant an unfair advantage through access to the startup's technology. The AI talent war shows no signs of cooling. As companies race to build the next generation of AI models, the demand for specialised talent will only grow. Startups will continue to dangle equity and autonomy, while Big Tech counters with unmatched resources.

Inside Silicon Valley's billion-dollar battle for AI talent

OpenAI is reportedly developing a social media platform similar to X, featuring an internal prototype that integrates ChatGPT's image generation capabilities. 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 specialized 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 math 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. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. 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. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment. 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. 10,000 times the talent 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. "Sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers...," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late 2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x) as effective as the average. 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. She has now lured even more researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now around 60 people, two sources told Reuters. Though the company has no product in the market, Murati is in the middle of closing record-breaking seed round that is, based on the team's strength. A representative for Murati declined to comment. The scarcity of talent has forced companies to approach hiring creatively. Zeki Data, a data firm focused on identifying top AI talent, said it is employing sports industry data analysis techniques like the one popularized by the movie "Moneyball" to identify promising but undiscovered talent. For instance, Zeki Data discovered Anthropic has been hiring researchers with theoretical physics backgrounds, and other AI companies have hired individuals with quantum computing backgrounds. Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment. "On my team, I have extraordinarily talented mathematicians who wouldn't have come to this field if it weren't for the fast progress that we're seeing now," said Sébastien Bubeck, who left his role as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft last year to join OpenAI. "We're seeing an influx of talent from all fields going into AI now. And some of these people are very, very clever, and they make a difference."

Google vs OpenAI ChatGpt: Tech giants find new ways to emerge winners in AI battle?

OpenAI, Google and other tech giants are eager to stay ahead in the race to create the best AI models.Silicon Valley is witnessing a new kind of contest in order to dominate the field of artificial intelligence. 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. 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 math 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. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. Ultimately, Brown said, he chose OpenAI because OpenAI was willing to put resources - both people and compute - behind the work he was excited about. 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. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment. 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. Q1. What is full form of AI? A1. The full form of AI is Artificial Intelligence. Q2. Who invented ChatGpt? A2. ChatGpt was developed by OpenAI.

Techies quickly brush up on AI, here's the whopping amount OpenAI, Google and xAI are shelling out and it's in millions

Big tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and xAI are fighting to hire the best AI researchers. These experts are super rare and very powerful in shaping AI. Some are getting huge bonuses and offers, and even ex-leaders like Mira Murati are starting rival AI firms.Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, tech companies are fighting hard to hire top AI researchers, it's like a battle to get superstars, as per reports. Hiring in AI labs is like playing chess, each person is a strategic move, and companies want people with the right skills, says Ariel Herbert-Voss, ex-OpenAI researcher and CEO of RunSybil. These top people are called "ICs", and their work can decide a company's future. When Noam Brown, a top OpenAI researcher, was job hunting in 2023, he got lunch with Google founder Sergey Brin, poker game at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's house, and a private jet visit from a rich investor, as mentioned in the report by Reuters. Even Musk, the Tesla boss and owner of xAI, is mesmerized by the researchers. So much so that he himself pitches his company and the job offer to these tech geeks. Noam Brown finally chose to stay at OpenAI because they supported his work, not just with money, but also people and computing power. He said it wasn't even the best financial offer, but doing meaningful work mattered more to him. Still, money is flowing big time, some top researchers at OpenAI were offered $2 million bonuses and $20 million in equity to stop them from leaving for SSI, a company by OpenAI's ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, says Reuters report. Full bonuses run in abundance among these rare breeds of researchers, with most of them required to stay just for a year to lap up the bonus paychecks. OpenAI researchers who got offers from Eleven Labs were given $1 million plus to stay. Many OpenAI researchers get over $10 million per year in total compensation, says reports. At Google DeepMind, researchers are being offered $20 million/year packages, extra equity grants outside normal cycles, and a stock vesting reduced to 3 years instead of 4, as per reports. In comparison, regular top tech engineers make around $280K in salary and another $260K in stock each year, way less than what star AI researchers are getting. In the AI world, there are only a few dozen to a thousand top AI researchers, very rare and super valuable, as mentioned in the report by Reuters. These rare experts are believed to be behind major progress in large language models. Open AI supremo Sam Altman, in a post on his now X but then Twitter handle, in 2023, said that 10x engineers are cool, but 10,000x researchers are even better. Mira Murati, who used to be the chief tech officer at OpenAI, left the company in September and started her own AI company.* She was known for her leadership and ability to get things done at OpenAI. By February, she had already hired 20 people from OpenAI, and now her team is around 60 people strong. Even though her company doesn't have a product yet, it's about to raise a record-breaking seed funding round, mostly because of how strong her team is, as per the report by Reuters. Because good AI talent is so rare, companies are getting creative. A company called Zeki Data is using sports-style scouting methods like the "Moneyball" movie to find under-the-radar AI talent. Other AI companies are hiring people with quantum computing experience. Sebastien Bubeck, who left Microsoft to join OpenAI, said AI is now attracting top talent from all fields, especially math. He told Reuters that some of these new people are super smart and really making a difference Q1. Why are tech companies paying so much to AI researchers? Because great AI researchers are rare and can help companies build better AI faster. Q2. How is hiring in AI different from other tech jobs? In AI, hiring is super competitive and focused on just a few top experts who can make a big impact.

OpenAI, Google, xAI battle for superstar AI talent, shelling out millions

Silicon Valley's AI talent war has intensified, with top researchers being courted like sports stars. OpenAI, Google, and others offer multimillion-dollar packages to retain elite "10,000x" contributors. Startups like Mira Murati's and data firms like Zeki Data are creatively sourcing talent, recognising the critical impact of a few exceptional individuals.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 specialized 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 math 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. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. 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. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment. 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. 10,000x talent 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. "sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers...," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late 2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x) as effective as the average. 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. She has now lured even more researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now around 60 people, two sources told Reuters. Though the company has no product in the market, Murati is in the middle of closing record-breaking seed round that is, based on the team's strength. A representative for Murati declined to comment. The scarcity of talent has forced companies to approach hiring creatively. Zeki Data, a data firm focused on identifying top AI talent, said it is employing sports industry data analysis techniques like the one popularized by the movie "Moneyball" to identify promising but undiscovered talent. For instance, Zeki Data discovered Anthropic has been hiring researchers with theoretical physics backgrounds, and other AI companies have hired individuals with quantum computing backgrounds. Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment. "On my team, I have extraordinarily talented mathematicians who wouldn't have come to this field if it weren't for the fast progress that we're seeing now," said Sebastien Bubeck, who left his role as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft last year to join OpenAI. "We're seeing an influx of talent from all fields going into AI now. And some of these people are very, very clever, and they make a difference."

OpenAI, Google, xAI battle for superstar AI talent, shelling out millions

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -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 specialized 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 math 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. xAI did not respond to a request for comment. 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. SSI and OpenAI declined to comment. 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. 10,000x TALENT 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. "sure 10x engineers are cool but damn those 10,000x engineer/researchers...," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted in late 2023, alluding to a long held maxim that the best software engineers were 10 times as good as the average (10x), but now in the AI industry, the best researchers are 10,000 times (10,000x) as effective as the average. 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. She has now lured even more researchers from OpenAI and other labs, and the team is now around 60 people, two sources told Reuters. Though the company has no product in the market, Murati is in the middle of closing a record-breaking seed round that is, based on the team's strength. A representative for Murati declined to comment. The scarcity of talent has forced companies to approach hiring creatively. Zeki Data, a data firm focused on identifying top AI talent, said it is employing sports industry data analysis techniques like the one popularized by the movie "Moneyball" to identify promising but undiscovered talent. For instance, Zeki Data discovered Anthropic has been hiring researchers with theoretical physics backgrounds, and other AI companies have hired individuals with quantum computing backgrounds. Anthropic did not reply to a request for comment. "On my team, I have extraordinarily talented mathematicians who wouldn't have come to this field if it weren't for the fast progress that we're seeing now," said Sébastien Bubeck, who left his role as vice president of GenAI research at Microsoft last year to join OpenAI. "We're seeing an influx of talent from all fields going into AI now. And some of these people are very, very clever, and they make a difference." (Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Claudia Parsons)