- Recruiting AI talent is ruthless, and Big Tech may be to blame.
- Recruiters say big tech companies offer their talent salaries that small and medium-sized companies can’t match.
- There also aren’t many workers with the right skills for AI-related jobs, but that will change.
The battle to hire the best AI talent is heating up as companies large and small compete to develop the best products in the rapidly growing field. Right now, the biggest tech companies with the biggest bank balances appear to be winning.
Last week, Mustafa Suleiman, co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, left his startup Inflection AI to lead tech giant Microsoft’s consumer AI division as CEO. A week earlier, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said on a podcast that Meta’s startup didn’t have enough GPUs (NVIDIA’s expensive, high-demand chips) to support top AI. He said he could not extract researchers. Following Sam Altman’s brief banishment from OpenAI last November, Salesforce tried to lure researchers away from the ChatGPT maker by offering compensation that matched their compensation package.
This cross-company workforce merry-go-round shows the high demand for employees who can build and train language models at scale. This is the key to getting AI to actually produce the results that companies want. But startups and small businesses are struggling to recruit workers with technical and non-technical AI skills, recruiters say, and some tech executives believe Big Tech is pushing them out of the field. He believes he is keeping them out.
“Companies like Meta are stealing talent and retaining it,” JT O’Donnell, founder and CEO of career coaching service Work It Daily, told Business Insider. And “smaller companies won’t be able to poach that talent because they don’t have what they need,” O’Donnell said.
Big tech companies willing to pay up to $1 million for AI talent
One of the reasons why it is so difficult for small businesses to find workers with the right skills is high costs.
“AI talent is some of the highest paid talent in today’s job market,” says Alex Libre, co-founder and lead recruiter at Einstellen Talent, a service that matches job seekers with generative AI startups. he told BI.
And in general, larger, more established companies tend to offer more funding. He has seen major companies offer at least $100,000 for junior positions and nearly seven figures for high-level specialists. This is bad news for small and medium-sized enterprises with weak financial strength.
Still, Libre says startups are now starting to make “very generous” offers, including equity, to early-stage AI adopters to compete with tech giants.
“We’ve seen founder machine learning engineers acquire 4% of a startup’s outstanding shares, which was completely unheard of before,” Libre told BI.
There is a shortage of talent with AI expertise.
But uneven financial incentives are not the only factor in the fight for workers. Many job seekers simply don’t have the right skills for the job.
“There is definitely a shortage of AI talent,” Libre said.
Libre said candidates for generative AI roles typically include “highly skilled” programmers and data scientists who are familiar with programming languages such as Python and have advanced degrees; He is also familiar with deep learning software libraries such as TensorFlow, Ray, and PyTorch.
But recruiters say companies are now willing to hire copywriters, product managers and other professionals without a technical background, as long as they have a good understanding of AI. This includes knowing how to apply technology to your workflow, creating high-quality prompts, and understanding the output produced by your bot.
“This skill set is not as rich as the industry needs, nor is it as rich as many people think,” Libre says.
Flavien Colonini, a recruiter at Hugging Face, agreed that Big Tech’s sector dominance and talent shortages combine to make it difficult to fill roles at open source AI startups.
“As a rapidly growing startup in a niche field like AI, we face intense competition from larger companies and more established players in the industry,” Coloni told BI. “Furthermore, the skills and expertise required by our team are highly specialized and there are only a limited number of people with the necessary experience and knowledge.”
Companies are just beginning to adopt AI.
Still, recruiters who spoke with BI acknowledged that generative AI is still fairly new and companies need time to catch up, but they will.
Some companies are doing this by hiring a chief AI officer, leveraging consultants, and having internal discussions about how to deploy the technology across the company.
Workers are also beginning to learn how to use generative AI through their employer’s skills training programs and external online courses. Hugging Face currently provides public educational resources such as videos and tutorials to help developers learn about natural language processing and other related topics.
As employers and employees understand more about the technology, it may become easier to assign the right talent to AI-related roles.
“It’s a journey,” O’Donnell said. “Every time you acquire a new skill set, it’s like the Wild West, where everyone is competing to get the best talent for employment.”
But for now, all companies need to offer to secure their ideal candidates is a good salary and an already established AI setup (with or without enough GPUs and other talented employees). zu) may be the only one. And it’s tilted in favor of large, wealthy players like Microsoft and Meta.
“People who are really interested in AI look for employers who have what they need to be successful,” she says.
