As technology companies continue to delve deeper into the field of AI, a talent war is unfolding.
Recently, Tesla(TSLA) CEO Elon Musk posted on social media platform claiming, “OpenAI has been aggressively poaching Tesla engineers with high salaries, and unfortunately, there have been successful examples of poaching.”
Last month, machine learning scientist Ethan Knight became the third Tesla engineer to join xAI. Musk revealed that just as Knight was about to switch to Open AI, he intervened and successfully persuaded Knight to join xAI.
“The AI talent war is the craziest talent war I’ve ever seen,” exclaimed Musk!
Is Musk’s AI startup poaching from Tesla? xAI is an AI startup founded by Musk in July 2023, focusing on addressing deeper scientific questions and hoping to use AI to help people solve complex scientific and mathematical problems and “understand” the universe. On March 17th of this year, xAI officially announced the open-source large model Grok-1, releasing model weights and architecture under the Apache 2.0 license.
Recent reports suggest that investors closely associated with Musk are in talks to help xAI raise $3 billion in a funding round, which would value the company at $18 billion.
The recent incident that prompted Musk to post an explanation was the poaching of talent from Tesla. Last month, machine learning scientist Ethan Knight joined xAI, making him the third Tesla engineer to do so.
Following reports of xAI poaching from Tesla, Musk posted an explanation, stating that while it may seem like xAI is “poaching” from Tesla, it’s actually Open AI poaching from Tesla, “if xAI doesn’t offer an offer, the person will be poached by Open AI.”
Before Musk, tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin had also joined the AI talent war. Earlier reports suggested that Meta CEO Zuckerberg personally wrote emails in an attempt to recruit AI researchers from Google’s DeepMind AI team; Google co-founder Sergey Brin had called an employee planning to switch to Open AI, urging them to stay at Google.
“The high salaries” are making this AI talent war even more intense. According to reports, when OpenAI poached from Google, it promised annual salaries (mainly in the form of stocks) ranging from $5 million to $10 million; Meta offered annual salaries of $1 million to $2 million for senior researchers hired externally; Musk also stated that he would raise salaries for Tesla(TSLA)’s AI team.
China’s AI positions, such as large models, are also attracting high salaries At a time when a talent war is raging in the global AI industry, China’s artificial intelligence positions, represented by large models, are also witnessing a phenomenon of high-paying “poaching”.
At the previous Shanghai Spring Comprehensive Employment Promotion Fair, reporters noticed that positions related to new productive forces industries, represented by artificial intelligence and large models, had become a hot spot in China’s recruitment market this year.
Zhang Jiaqing, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of OpenShin, said in an interview with Securities Times reporters that the development of large models has entered a deep-water area, empowering thousands of industries. At this time, more diversified talents are needed, including data processing, model training, and application development based on large models.
Represented by ChatGPT, generative AI has sparked a technological craze, and leading Chinese enterprises are actively exploring the boundaries and applications of generative AI large models, leading to a surge in talent demand for corresponding positions. A report released by China Talent International shows that in the context of overall internet salary reductions, the salary increase for positions such as large model architecture and natural language algorithm engineers can still exceed 30%.
“Talents in positions such as large models, big data, and computing power are relatively scarce in the job market, and many companies will focus on recruiting them, with demand being quite high,” said Liu Mengmeng, Senior Marketing Director and Head of the Market Research Center at China Talent International, in an interview with reporters. “Enterprises are willing to go to great lengths and allocate resources to recruit talents in the forefront of current technologies.”
According to Liu Mengmeng, many of her clients are deploying positions in areas such as large models and artificial intelligence. “During the Spring Festival, some clients sent demands for related positions.”