Google's AI Talent War
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A story about how Google responded when OpenAI started recruiting their top AI talent, particularly after poaching their leading researcher Ilya.
"Google starts offering all of their talent crazy lavish offers. They just up the ante like crazy - they're like 'we're gonna price anyone out of this market.' We're talking a million dollars per employee minimum, for some people 10-15 million dollar pay packages annually.
Sam and Greg emailed Elon saying 'Hey, it's getting really hard to recruit, we have to think of a strategy here, Google is doing this.' Elon replies: 'We need to do what it takes to get top talent. Let's go higher. If at some point we have to revisit what our current people are getting paid, that's fine. Either we get the best people in the world or we will get whipped by DeepMind. Whatever it takes to bring on the ace talent is fine by me. DeepMind is causing me extreme mental stress - if they win it will be really bad news with their one mind to rule the world philosophy. They're obviously making major progress given the talent level over there.'
He basically gives them the green light - 'I'll keep funding more, go get the best talent.' In 2016 he gives them 15 million, in 2017 he gives them 20 million. In that 5-year period, he gives them 44 million in total."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.