Google, meanwhile, signed a $2.4 billion deal this month to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and chief executive of Windsurf, the AI coding start-up, and other senior Windsurf research and development employees. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry,\u201d Zuckerberg wrote on Threads, one of his social media platforms, last Monday. \u201cWe\u2019re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars \u2026 to build superintelligence.\u201d <\/p>\n
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are also fighting over tech engineers as though they are professional athletes. Sarah Guo, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, claimed on X that some top candidates were using agents to negotiate their compensation packages like international footballers.<\/p>\n
The AI investor Deedy Das said three friends working as machine-learning engineers or researchers at OpenAI or Anthropic told him they had been offered between $8 million and $20 million in total annual compensation to join Meta. The sum included cash sign-on bonuses and stock options, said Deedy, who works at Menlo Ventures, a Palo Alto-based investor in Anthropic.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of Fomo [fear of missing out],\u201d he said. \u201cI think if you break it down psychologically, it is such a massive jolt to your notion of how the world works, right?<\/p>\n
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\u201cSome of the people who\u2019ve been offered this money are like, \u2018I planned out a career and I would be doing this for 30 years, and I would maybe make this amount of money in total, and now I\u2019m making it in one year.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cSimilarly, everybody who has that skill, or believes that they have that skill and hasn\u2019t been approached, is asking the question, \u2018What am I doing? Why am I not there? Or, should I be targeting that job?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Crazy talent bubble\u2019<\/p>\n
The talent wars kicked off in November 2022 when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, forcing tech companies to dive head-first into artificial intelligence. But Silicon Valley insiders say the competition for the most exceptional industry talent has intensified in recent weeks. <\/p>\n
In a blog post last Sunday, John Luttig, a partner at the San Francisco-based Founders Fund, said the tech industry was in a \u201ccrazy AI talent bubble\u201d that represented \u201ca new normal for the foreseeable future \u2026 If the top 1 per cent of companies drive the majority of venture capital returns, why shouldn\u2019t the same apply to talent?\u201d<\/p>\n
Analysis of filings for the H-1B visa, which is offered only to specialist employees of exceptional ability, show that Meta has offered one software engineer a top base salary of $480,000 before stock options and bonuses. Salaries for machine learning engineers at Meta\u2019s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, also exceed $400,000.<\/p>\n
At Thinking Machines Lab, the AI start-up launched by Mira Murati, former chief technology officer of OpenAI, a base salary of $450,000 was listed for a machine learning scientist. Meanwhile, at OpenAI itself, led by Sam Altman, research engineers have been offered base salaries of $440,000.<\/p>\n
Engineers at tech firms typically receive a large portion of their compensation in stock. OpenAI paid a total of $4.4 billion in stock-based compensation last year, according to The Information, a technology news media site. OpenAI presently has about 5,300 employees, equating to an average of $830,200 in stock compensation per person.<\/p>\n
Graduates falling out of the market<\/p>\n
A sharp divide in the talent wars is emerging as graduate tech roles are cut while experienced engineers are being showered with huge offers. A report published in May by SignalFire, the San Francisco venture capital firm, found that graduate hiring in tech had fallen 50 per cent compared with pre-pandemic levels.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs AI tools take over more routine, entry-level tasks, companies are prioritising roles that deliver high-leverage technical output,\u201d the report found. \u201cSo far, the fallout has hit new grads hardest, while demand for experienced engineers is still rising. As AI capabilities continue to grow, the real differentiator will be talent, and no one\u2019s playing the game harder than the top AI labs.\u201d<\/p>\n