Silicon Valley\u2019s largest companies are spending<\/a> big to hire<\/a> and acquire<\/a> AI researchers and engineers as they chase superintelligence. Staff with experience building so-called foundation models\u2014the multi-purpose systems that power tools like ChatGPT or Gemini\u2014are particularly in demand. \u201cIt\u2019s clearly a very competitive dynamic for talent at the moment,\u201d said Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind, which has recruited from and lost staff to rivals Meta<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a>, OpenAI<\/a> and others<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n \t \n\tBy \t The in-house AI units of Canada\u2019s two largest financial institutions were also in San Diego to hire. Perks help with the recruitment pitch, but executives say a big focus of their pitch to top researchers is the chance to solve gnarly, real-world problems. TD Bank\u2019s Layer 6 and RBC\u2019s Borealis both employ AI researchers, publish journal papers and present their work at academic conferences like NeurIPS.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re here to show all these people what we do,\u201d said Greg Mori, vice-president at Borealis. While most of the tech giants are focusing on general-purpose models, RBC\u2019s AI teams have applied the technology to practical applications such as stock trading and loan adjudication tools.\u00a0<\/p>\n TD has similarly had success hiring staff away from tech firms by giving them the chance to shape how AI is deployed in financial services. \u201cA lot of the use cases that we do are the first of its kind at the bank,\u201d said Maksims Volkovs, chief AI scientist and co-founder of Layer 6. \u201cYou can really transform the business.\u201d He cited new AI tools the unit has built that help call centre workers give the right answers or write risk memos for borrowers. The firm also has plans to develop generative AI assistants that account holders can consult with for financial questions.<\/p>\n Telus Digital sells data collection and validation services to AI developers, and sometimes competes with those clients for talent. A spinout<\/a> of the Canadian telecom giant, it attracts people looking for \u201ca stable, well-funded company that has a clearly defined mission,\u201d said Steve Nemzer, director of AI growth and innovation. \u201cIt can be chaotic to work at a foundational model builder.\u201d Meta, for example, has committed hundreds of millions to recruit top researchers but laid off<\/a> 600 AI staff, including some recent hires, as it chases superintelligence.<\/p>\n Some of those leaving the race to create smarter-than-human AI at the tech giants are heading to AI upstarts. \u201cWhat researchers care about is, \u2018Am I at the cutting edge of what\u2019s possible? And am I working with other people who are incredibly talented?\u2019\u201d said Sara Hooker, co-founder of Adaption, a San Francisco-based startup working on a new way to build and improve AI models.<\/p>\n A former Google scientist, Hooker was most recently an executive at Toronto-based Cohere, where she led the firm\u2019s non-profit research arm. \u201cMost of my career has been doing my tour of duty at frontier labs,\u201d she said, where the focus is to \u201cbuild a single model to rule them all.\u201d Most of those firms are trying to improve their AI systems by scaling up the data and processing power used to train them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Adaption, by contrast, is trying to build models that evolve in real time to fit the task they\u2019re assigned. It plans to unveil its technology next year. The startup is working to recruit researchers from large tech firms who are similarly skeptical of the scaling approach, Hooker said. \u201cIn some ways, the talent selects itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the executives at NeurIPS in San Diego said the AI talent wars have driven up salaries in an already hot market. Researchers who\u2019ve worked on commercially successful AI models and engineers with machine learning operations experience are in particularly high demand, Nemzer said. \u201cThey\u2019re writing their own tickets right now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The tussle for star researchers, and the multimillion-dollar salaries on offer, have grabbed headlines, but this is unlikely to be the last round of AI job-swapping. Hooker predicted firms offering researchers a compelling challenge will have an easier time than those just flashing cash. \u201cWhat happens after a year when all those initial paycheques kick in?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN DIEGO \u2014 The race for top AI talent shows no sign of relenting as tech giants, AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":366039,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[156873,62,276,277,49,48,139774,17042,9756,55204,64,61,156874],"class_list":["post-366038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-adaption","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-neurips","tag-rbc","tag-talent","tag-td-bank","tag-tech","tag-technology","tag-telus-digital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/366039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\t![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/AI_talent_series-P_Sebastien_Thibault-The_Logic-1920x1280-1-768x512.jpeg\")
\t<\/a><\/p>\n
\n\tCatherine McIntyre and Leah Golob\n\t<\/p>\n
\n\t![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Vector_Institute-DLRL-Students-Toronto-July_2024-Christopher_Katsarov_Luna_The_Logic-CKL122-1920x128.jpeg\")
\t<\/a><\/p>\n