Microsoft has struck another blow in the “war for talent” by hiring more than 20 leading employees from Google’s rival DeepMind division. Among them is Amar Subramanian, the former head of Gemini chatbot engineering, who will now serve as vice president of AI at Microsoft. This was reported by the Financial Times.
The personnel war between tech giants
Subramanian’s move, who said his new team has “ambition without egocentricity,” is part of a broader trend. Over the past six months, Microsoft has poached at least 24 specialists from DeepMind. Engineering Director Sonal Gupta, Programmer Adam Sadovsky, and Manager Tim Frank have also joined the company.
The competition for talent between the two tech giants has intensified since DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman took over as head of consumer AI strategy at Microsoft. He had already taken several key specialists with him, and Microsoft effectively absorbed most of the team from his previous startup, Inflection, paying $650 million for a technology license.
Consequences for Google
This brain drain is creating serious problems for Google DeepMind, which is trying to remain competitive in the field of artificial intelligence. According to internal Google documents cited by the publication, their flagship product, Gemini, lags behind its competitor in popularity, with 400 million monthly users versus 600 million for ChatGPT.
Commenting on the situation, Google stated that the brain drain at DeepMind is lower than the industry average and that the company is also actively recruiting specialists from other laboratories, including Microsoft.
“War for talent”
The reason for this “war” is an acute shortage of personnel. There are thousands of people worldwide who can utilize AI. Still, the number of specialists capable of creating, training, and fundamentally improving large language models is measured in the hundreds. A single leading researcher or a small team can create a technological breakthrough that can bring a company hundreds of billions of dollars. Therefore, giant companies are willing to pay astronomical salaries and compensation packages, viewing such people not just as employees, but as strategic assets that determine the winner in the race for technological dominance.
The poaching of not just engineers, but the head of engineering for Gemini, Google’s flagship product, is an excruciating blow. It raises questions about Google’s ability to retain key talent and could negatively impact morale within the DeepMind team.
Microsoft, for its part, under the leadership of Mustafa Suleyman, is forming a veritable “super team” by bringing together the best specialists from all the leading laboratories (Google, Inflection, OpenAI).