The talent war for AI researchers continues to get the spotlight. Facebook parent Meta has been accused of going to unprecedented levels to poach OpenAI researchers in recent days. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg aims to recruit a team of experienced researchers for his superintelligence lab, led by Alexandr Wang from Scale AI. Publicly, about 8 researchers have already left OpenAI for Meta, including Shengjia Zhao, Shuchao Bi, Hongyu Ren and IIT alumnus Trupit Bansal. Many believe Meta’s aggressive tactics have gone too far, even as OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen experienced feeling like “someone has broken into our home and stolen something.”
Reports have explained how Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been forced to talk to employees considering Meta’s offers with personalised retention efforts, and last-minute counteroffers, sometimes working ‘round the clock’ with his chief research officer, Mark Chen, for this.
In a leaked Slack message to his employees, Sam Altman accused Meta of ‘acting in a way that feels somewhat distasteful,’ even as he acknowledges that the problem has persisted for quite some time.
“I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist,” he adds.
Zuckerberg seems to be obsessed with poaching talent from OpenAI. He has reportedly been reaching out directly to OpenAI employees with aggressive offers, even as Meta has faced enormous backlash for its aggressive poaching efforts.
Sam Altman does have a reason for concern. The Generative AI technology wave spearheaded by him has meant that skilled researchers in the AI domain are in short supply, even as the dearth of talent means pulling out all the stops to hire or retain talent. Recruiters know that only a few hundred people possess the right combination of engineering experience, advanced research skills, and mathematical fluency to develop cutting-edge AI models. Now that AI models have been writing most of the code, recruiters have been facing an uphill battle to find the right talent, and poaching from others is the most effective, if not the only, solution to meet the recruitment targets.
