#ai-talent

#ai-talent

Delaying, dropping out of, or skipping college altogether have long been popular in Silicon Valley. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison have all done some version of it. As artificial intelligence hype draws young founders to San Francisco, programs at companies like Palantir Technologies are rolling out anti-college initiatives for high school graduates. Meanwhile, startup entrepreneurship programs like Y Combinator skew increasingly younger, as taking a gap year has become less contrarian and more mainstream for aspiring technocrats.

They're not called the AI talent wars for nothing. With Big Tech firms scrambling to attract top talent, executives and artificial intelligence researchers have done a lot of job-hopping this year, and Apple employees were no exception. The company has lost over a dozen employees who worked on its AI projects, from executives to scientists to engineers, and even its AI chief, John Giannandrea, who announced this week he was stepping down from the role.

Dayforce will today release its annual pulse survey of roughly 7,000 workers in six countries, showing that 71% of workers have not received AI training in the past year-even though 63% of workers say developing such skills is important. The result is that 27% of the workers surveyed say they're using AI on the job, vs 87% of executives and 57% of managers.

As skilled workers become essential to tech companies like his own, Karp thinks they'll also get more expensive. "Artist-shaped people are going to be incredibly valuable, and they're going to demand to be very highly paid," he added. (Karp and Palantir employees sometimes refer to the company's culture as "an artist colony.") And after an AI frenzy of a summer, higher pay isn't all that surprising.

Musk stated on X, "Many strong Meta engineers have and are joining xAI and without the need for insane initial comp, still great, but not unsustainably high."

Thinking Machines Lab has raised a historic $2 billion seed round, valuing the firm at $12 billion and underscoring intense competition for AI talent and technology.

"Hire a bunch of these people," he said in a Monday interview on the a16z podcast, "because they're going to flip your company on its head in terms of how much faster the organization can run."

Microsoft's substantial investment in AI includes billions spent on its flagship Copilot tool and it remains the largest investor in OpenAI, despite some relationship issues.

"There's a ton of ripple effects I'm hearing in the Valley. There is a sense of jealousy, envy, and helplessness, and everybody being like, 'I thought I was doing pretty well. What am I doing wrong?...'"