While the tech industry is is at the forefront of layoffs in the US – Which reached its highest level since the Great Recession in February – one sector of the industry is struggling to find suitable workers and is starting a war for talent with offers reportedly reaching up to $1 million.
In addition to high salary packages, companies ranging from petite start-ups to industry leaders like OpenAI and Meta are even offering accelerated stock vesting schedules trying to poach entire teams– reported the Wall Street Journal.
“There is a secular shift in talent search,” Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks, told the daily. “On the one hand we have an excess of people and on the other hand we have a shortage.”
ChatGPT developer OpenAI reportedly offered an average salary (including bonus and equity) of $925,000, Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of salary and career data platform Levels.fyi, told the Journal. Six OpenAI job candidates consulted Levels.fyi about their offers. Meanwhile, among the 344 machine learning and artificial intelligence engineers at Meta, the average salary including bonus and equity was around $400,000, according to salaries reported by Levels.fyi.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even did this wrote personal emails to AI researchers in Google’s DeepMind to convince to work at Meta, sources tell The Information. A company that focuses on developing an AI model to display video recommendations on their platformsit also reportedly offered jobs to candidates without interviews and reversed its policy of not offering higher salaries to workers with job offers from competitors.
Tech giants including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Meta have it all announced layoffs this year, partly to refocus on the development of artificial intelligence. Many tech companies do too exceeded employment in 2021 during the IPO and startup financing boom, but have since cited restructuring and economic conditions as the reasons for the recent layoffs.
“Companies are aggressively cutting costs and adopting technological innovations, which is significantly changing staffing needs,” said Andrew Challenger, labor and workplace expert at Challenger latest layoff report.