- A brain drain among tech companies brain is underway right now, driven by the popularity of AI.
- Workers are not afraid to jump ship so they can work on the buzziest AI projects.
- Elon Musk’s new company xAI managed to snare workers from several of his competitors.
Tech firms are pretty obsessed with AI right now. But if their leaders aren’t obsessed enough, they could see invaluable workers walk right out the door to work for those who are.
In other words, AI is posing a bit of a brain-drain problem – and tech CEOs will need to act fast or risk losing their very best talent.
Here’s the latest example: Elon Musk, who announced his new company xAI on Wednesday – part of his mission to take on OpenAI, DeepMind and Google – managed to poach a bunch of workers from his AI arch-rivals to establish his founding team.
Among the 12 men making up the new company are some of the most sought-after AI talent from rival firms: Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss and Guodong Zhang of Google-owned DeepMind, Yuhuai Wu, Zihang Dai and Christian Szegedy of Google, Kyle Kosic of OpenAI.
What’s notable is just how many of those workers come from Google and DeepMind, which made a drastic move in April to create a combined entity willing to put aside internal schisms in the face of the common threat that is ChatGPT.
The search giant has been in a bit of panic since the launch of ChatGPT in November, rushing to release rival chatbot Bard just two months afterwards amid fears OpenAI’s chatbot could pose an existential threat to its core business.
But there has been a sense that Google is lagging well behind OpenAI, which has had a boost to its generative AI capabilities thanks to the backing (and billions of dollars) of Microsoft. First impressions count, after all, and the first impressions haven’t been in Google’s favor.
It’s part of the reason why several talented workers got up and left the search giant and headed towards Silicon Valley’s land of milk and honey, OpenAI. Even before ChatGPT’s launch, Google workers seemed fed up and decided to jump ship to OpenAI to help launch ChatGPT.
But even OpenAI isn’t immune to this risk. Sure, ChatGPT has done plenty to capture the imagination of corporate America already (as my colleague Shona Ghosh and I noted this month, CEOs just can’t stop talking about the chatbot) but it isn’t promised eternal glory.
GPT-4, the large language model underlying OpenAI’s technology, seems to be “lazier” and “dumber,” per users, thanks to an apparent redesign.
Meanwhile, Musk’s somewhat modest ambition for his new AI company to “understand the true nature of the universe” could prove alluring to tech bros who think that’s what AI should be used to accomplish.
Thanks to AI’s growing popularity, there’s clearly no shortage of opportunities for AI engineers and others to choose from. Tech firms will want to ensure their AI projects make them the top pick.
