Source: Hard AI
Author: Fang Jiayao
Musk: “While OpenAI is luring Tesla engineers with high salaries, Tesla is fighting back by increasing pay.”
As technology companies continue to cultivate and invest more in the AI field, a battle for AI talents has begun within the technology industry.
On Wednesday evening, Tesla CEO Musk posted a series of posts on social media platform X saying, “At a time when OpenAI is luring Tesla engineers with high salaries, Tesla is fighting back by increasing pay.”
He said that the competition for AI engineers by big manufacturers is “the craziest talent war I've ever seen.”
The battle for AI talent in Silicon Valley
The boom in AI has intensified competition among tech giants, with startups competing with established tech giants to create the next great AI product. As a result, the battle for AI talent in Silicon Valley is particularly intense, and being able to attract and retain AI technicians is seen as one of the key factors in the success of current tech giants.
Currently, the technology industry is undergoing changes. Technology companies are reallocating resources. While cutting out redundant businesses and layoffs continue, they are focusing their capital more on major tracks such as AI, and betting more on AI talents.
Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks, recently stated: “The technology industry is undergoing a fundamental shift in the pursuit of talent. On the one hand, there is a surplus of talent in technical positions, and on the other, there is a scarcity of talented people in specific fields of AI.”
Rao insisted that although recruitment for ordinary software engineer positions is not a problem, there are few qualified candidates when it comes to large-scale language model (LLMs) training or experts solving AI problems, and it is estimated that there are no more than 200 people worldwide.
At the same time, sales talent with advanced skills and a deep understanding of the industry is becoming scarce. Rao points out that sales professionals with these special skills can pay twice as much as traditional enterprise software sales staff.
The temptation of an annual salary of one million
According to reports, technology companies are using methods such as an annual salary of one million, speeding up stock redemption plans, and scavenging entire engineering teams to compete for AI expert talents. Even when measured by the industry's relatively generous pay and benefits standards in the past, these benefits are still outstanding.
Rao said that in the face of layoffs in other fields of technology, the annual salary quotes for frontline AI talents can easily break one million US dollars.
According to data from more than 1,500 employers surveyed by WTW, between April 2022 and April 2023, the basic wage increase for management employees in the AI and machine learning industry was between 5% and 11%, and the basic wage increase for non-management workers was 13% to 19%.
ZuhaYeer Musa, co-founder of Levels.fyi, an online platform for career and salary information, said the average salary of the six candidates who consulted OpenAI jobs on the platform was $925,000, including bonuses and equity.
Although the basic pay of startups is often lower than that of established tech companies, they offer unique conditions to attract AI talent.
On the one hand, some AI talents think they are better able to achieve their value in startups. For example, Arthur Mensch, a former Google employee, left the company and founded the startup Mistral AI. The company was founded less than a year ago, and its valuation has rapidly risen to over $2 billion.
On the other hand, Justin Kinsey, president of semiconductor recruitment company SBT Industries, said that many startups promise AI talents to have work autonomy to win the favor of candidates.
As a result, professionals continue to choose to leave their stable jobs and join high-risk startups with huge room for growth.
Editor/Jeffy