Microsoft has begun poaching Google's AI talent, using Meta tactics - WSJ

Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleiman, who recently moved to Microsoft, is now poaching top AI experts from his former company, The Wall Street Journal has learned. According to the publication, he's offering high salaries and more autonomy to attract top engineers to strengthen Microsoft's position in the AI race. This approach is already yielding results, with dozens of Google employees moving there in recent months.

Like Meta Platforms founder Mark Zuckerberg, who personally does the hunting in the market, Suleiman is calling candidates and telling them that Microsoft's AI division, created a year ago, operates in an agile and startup-like manner - unlike DeepMind, which has become more heavyweight under Google, sources told WSJ. They said the head of Microsoft AI is offering  a high salary and the opportunity to turn chatbot Copilot into a serious competitor to market leader ChatGPT.

The rewards offered by Microsoft are lower than those offered by Meta, said those who received the offers. Zuckerberg's company has promised some researchers contracts worth $300 million. However, Microsoft's rates are much higher than Google DeepMind's - especially for engineers with experience;

According to WSJ sources, at least twenty Google employees, mostly from DeepMind, have joined Microsoft in the past few months. They include former DeepMind lead engineer Adam Sadowski and former Google vice president of engineering Amar Subramanya. 

Once upon a time, it was Google that poached employees from Microsoft, promising more freedom and less formality, remembers former Google staffer Laszlo Bock. Now, he says, the opposite is true: Google increasingly resembles the old Microsoft - with huge profits, but clumsy, hierarchical and politicized. "It feels like the company is now run by a financier, not an engineer," he said. Two new Microsoft employees confirmed to the WSJ that they wanted to get away from excessive bureaucracy: DeepMind has grown from a small lab to a 6,000-person structure in recent years.

Google, for its part, stated to the publication that its employee turnover is below the industry average, and reminded that it itself hires from Microsoft.

Zuckerberg has made AI Meta's top priority to keep up with market leaders OpenAI and Google. He has been actively recruiting top talent from OpenAI, Apple and other competitors to join his artificial "superintelligence" team, offering nine-figure rewards. By data Bloomberg, Meta's founder is personally involved in negotiations with potential employees, meeting with them at his homes in Silicon Valley and Lake Tahoe, and initiating meetings himself.

Financial reports in recent weeks show how the boom in artificial intelligence is reshaping Microsoft and Alphabet, Google's parent company. Both tech giants have reported a surge in revenue - driven in part by demand for cloud-based AI services. They also announced plans to increase investment in data centers: Alphabet raised its capex forecast for the year from $75 billion to $85 billion, while Microsoft planned over $30 billion in investments for the current quarter. 

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor