Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin goes to great lengths to retain AI talent

SILICON VALLEY: As the war for mastering artificial intelligence (AI) heats up, tech giants are going to great lengths to retain their best minds in the field of AI.

In one such incident, Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly managed to convince an employee from accepting an invitation to join Chat-GPT developer OpenAI.

According to reports, the Google’s co-founder personally intervened to convince an employee to reject an offer from OpenAI. Sergey Brin reportedly offered higher compensation enough to manage to convince the employee to stay.

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This incident is one of many as tech giants such as Alphabet (Google’s parent company) and Meta (formerly Facebook) fight to retain the best minds in the field of AI.

In recent years, AI technology has grown leaps and bounds, revolutionising various sectors. Demand for people with the skills and expertise in the field has grown tenfold, while the scarcity of such skilled persons has prompted the tech giants hoping to lead the next technological revolution to engage in fierce completion.

The tech giants from Alphabet to Meta are all vying to attract the best people to drive their AI projects forward. In simple economic terms, the demand for AI-proficient professionals is more than the supply currently.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly personally reached out to AI-proficient professionals at Google, trying to entice them with huge benefits to join his company’s AI projects.

As per reports, Zuckerberg seems to have gone further with scraping the need for formal interviews even to secure the AI professionals.

While the ‘gold rush’ for mastering AI wars continue, people and governments worldwide have also raised alarm over the unchecked use of the AI.

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OpenAI was sued by the New York Times in December 2023 in a copyright lawsuit, citing “unauthorized use of [its] punished work“.

In the lawsuit, the newspaper complained that millions of its published articles were utilised to train OpenAI’s chat-bot ChatGPT. According to the Times, the chat-bot can now rival all news outlets as a source of ‘reliable information”.

In February, Google’s AI chat-bot Gemini stirred controversy when it produced images seen by many as racially and gender-wise ‘insensitive”. Gemini produced black Vikings, female Popes among other that forced the company to shut down the chat-bot’s image generator for a while.