tech
Google takes the hit in AI's talent war
Top talent wants to land at the lab that wins the race for AGI.
TL;DR
- Two prominent researchers, Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, have left Google DeepMind for OpenAI and Anthropic, respectively.
- Shazeer co-authored the 'Attention Is All You Need' paper, introducing the Transformer architecture.
- Jumper shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold.
- Barret Zoph has departed OpenAI for a second time, after leaving Thinking Machines over alleged misconduct.
- Nvidia has acqui-hired the team behind Essential AI, including Ashish Vaswani.
- The competition for AI talent is intensifying as many believe artificial general intelligence (AGI) is imminent.
- Highly sought-after researchers offer judgment, experience with large experiments, and recruitment capabilities.
- Financial incentives, computing power, company prospects, and ethical leadership influence researchers' decisions.
- Anthropic and OpenAI may have an advantage due to forthcoming IPOs.