The AI Boom is Sending Silicon Valley's Talent Wars To New Extremes (wsj.com) 26
Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers to poach entire engineering teams to draw people with expertise and experience in the kind of generative AI that is powering ChatGPT and other humanlike bots. They are competing against each other and against startups vying to be the next big thing to unseat the giants. From a report: The offers stand out even by the industry's relatively lavish past standards of outsize pay and perks. And the current AI talent shortage stands out for another reason: It is happening as layoffs are continuing in other areas of tech and as companies have been reallocating resources to invest more in covering the enormous cost of developing AI technology.
"There is a secular shift in what talents we're going after," says Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks. "We have a glut of people on one side and a shortage on the other." Databricks, a data storage and management startup, doesn't have a problem finding software engineers. But when it comes to candidates who have trained large language models, or LLMs, from scratch or can help solve vexing problems in AI, such as hallucinations, Rao says there might be only a couple of hundred people out there who are qualified.
Some of these hard-to-find, tier-one candidates can easily get total compensation packages of $1 million a year or more. Salespeople in AI are also in demand and hard to find. Selling at the beginning of a technology transition when things are changing rapidly requires a different skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with those skills are making around double what an enterprise software salesperson would. But that isn't the norm for most people working in AI, Rao says. For managerial roles in AI and machine learning, base-pay increases ranged from 5% to 11% from April 2022 to April 2023, according to a WTW survey of more than 1,500 employers. The base-pay increases of nonmanagerial roles ranged from 13% to 19% during the same period.
"There is a secular shift in what talents we're going after," says Naveen Rao, head of Generative AI at Databricks. "We have a glut of people on one side and a shortage on the other." Databricks, a data storage and management startup, doesn't have a problem finding software engineers. But when it comes to candidates who have trained large language models, or LLMs, from scratch or can help solve vexing problems in AI, such as hallucinations, Rao says there might be only a couple of hundred people out there who are qualified.
Some of these hard-to-find, tier-one candidates can easily get total compensation packages of $1 million a year or more. Salespeople in AI are also in demand and hard to find. Selling at the beginning of a technology transition when things are changing rapidly requires a different skill set and depth of knowledge. Candidates with those skills are making around double what an enterprise software salesperson would. But that isn't the norm for most people working in AI, Rao says. For managerial roles in AI and machine learning, base-pay increases ranged from 5% to 11% from April 2022 to April 2023, according to a WTW survey of more than 1,500 employers. The base-pay increases of nonmanagerial roles ranged from 13% to 19% during the same period.
Seen it (Score:5, Funny)
Once this bubble bursts it will be fun to see resumes pouring in with "Chief AI Wrangler" titles, going straight to the shredder.
Re: (Score:2)
There's gonna be a big "adjustment" because of this. I'm wondering who's going to foot the bill?
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I'm wondering who's going to foot the bill?
The same people who always foot the bill, suckers the Venture Capital and Startups manage to con into buying in on the scheme. Pump up the price and then move the assets around to more "stable investments" so when the company eventually crashes the "investors" are left holding the bag while the VC firm and startup's CEO walk away with millions / billions in untouchable assets.
Sure, but what's the use-case at scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
Using chat bots for customer service screws over customers and slowly destroys customer retention. Using it to write ad-copy leads to hallucinatory spam chasing away new and old customers. And using it to fill the internet with fake market data designed to inflate the value of a digital or non-digital asset is just illegal.
What's this "AI" actually doing?
Re:Sure, but what's the use-case at scale? (Score:5, Insightful)
All this blather about achieving true AGI next quarter is pure drivel, but the current unreliable LLMs can still drastically enhance productivity in some types of jobs.
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I'm not a copy editor, but I'm not sure that filtering outright, intricate, willful, quadruple-down fabulism out of "copy" is a traditional part of a copy editor's job. I think you may be underestimating how much work it will be to filter out this stuff, and how much of it will slip through. It's designed to look real, and to pass inspection. These systems inspect their own output to make sure its bullshit is as intractable as possible.
These points could all be applied to human writers. Human writers can hallucinate every bit as well as AI engines by misremembering things and by referencing incorrect sources. Furthermore, human writers can outright lie and have bias-driver agendas. The editor does not necessarily have an easy job, but it's not obvious that the editing job is harder with ChatGPT. In fact, this would be an interesting research experiment.
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Let's be honest here. These tools are being used to create and manage swarms of social media accounts. Hopefully that's for the sake of a marketing campaign but increasing seems to be for propaganda campaigns or some kind of extortionate fraud.
Social media is almost entirely
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What is the rule? 99% of advertising is wasted, the trick is finding the 1% that worked?
I've always wondered who the hell actually clicks on the vast majority of junk ads, and they are truly junk. I think I can count on one hand the number of ads in the last month that I've chosen to actually follow. I'd say the majority of my "clicks" were misclicks, like trying to close some crappy video window. I assume most advertisers are just being lied to constantly and getting bogus click through metrics to keep
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This seems to fall to the misconception that the hardest part about writing is the initial draft. It isn't. It's the conceiving what to write and the rewriting and edits it takes to get a good piece. This is the exact same thing with coding. AI generated text quickly falls to such a low level that it puts more of a burden on the editors than editing a decent first draft.
People are so impressed by transformer based LLMs being conversational that they just overlook the actual quality of the generated output o
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Seriously? You expect investors and silicon valley to show a real goal or realistic ROI plan?
Re:Sure, but what's the use-case at scale? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Personally, I'd rather talk to an AI chatbot than most human "customer service" people I've dealt with.
A repeat of the dotcom boom (Score:3, Insightful)
Tech companies are serving up million-dollar-a-year compensation packages, accelerated stock-vesting schedules and offers...
We have seen this before during the dotcom boom, and it didn't last long until the bubble bursted. That didn't mean the Internet was a wholly a fad, it was just that technology takes time to produce productivity gains, and eventually Internet giants did emerge after the bust.
Right now, AI looks more like the money-burning dotcom companies during the boom, everyone is rushing out their AI models, but few have an actual business plan on how to use the model to produce stuff that makes money. 20 years from now, everyone's life might be greatly improved by AI models, but it could be 10 years from now when we finally have something that AI is actually useful for.
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You'll never get rich with that attitude! You need a short runway exit strategy, first mover advantage and a slick PowerPoint deck full of the hottest buzzwords!
No VC will give you big easy money talking about 20 years.
Re:A repeat of the dotcom boom (Score:5, Interesting)
We have seen this before during the dotcom boom, and it didn't last long until the bubble bursted.
The tech bubble took 5 years to burst, after starting with the NASDAQ's 40% growth in 1995. It went along with an average of 29% growth for 3 years until 1998 when it had two 50%+ years of growth. But even after the bubble burst the NASDAQ only dropped down to early 1997 levels, which was two years into the steep incline in tech related stocks.
If the AI boom is anything like the dotcom boom, then we have another 3-4 years of insane growth ahead of us. And after the burst, tech valuations would still be higher then than they are today.
Of the largest internet companies today, Alphabet, Amazon, and Netflix were all 90's startups. Only Meta was founded after the bubble burst. If that experience also holds true for the AI boom, then most of the companies who will be the big AI winners in 20 years already exist today and are benefiting from this extreme level of AI related funding. This is why investors aren't waiting around for another 5-10 years for the dust to settle.
More blight on society (Score:2)
AI generated crap and lies and the world gets just a little bit worse.
How convenient (Score:4, Insightful)
Databricks puff piece in NYT on same day as DataBricks drops new model. I hope the "reporter" at least got a nice lunch.
What "talent"? (Score:2)
Those doing "practical" work in the AI field are pretty much as talenless as their tool.
the capitalist mindset (Score:2)
They must be using AI to scour incoming resumes for buzzwords.
Re: the capitalist mindset (Score:2)
But what about... (Score:4, Funny)
More good jobs for the rest of us (Score:2)
The "AI experts" will be sucked out of the job marketplace by these clueless high-paying startups. The real jobs, the ones that require actual engineering, will have less competition for open positions, potentially driving up wages for all of us.
I wrote some java code in 2001 (Score:2)
Do you think they might hire somebody like me, at one of these AI startups???