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Microsoft has recruited more than 20 artificial intelligence employees from Google’s DeepMind research division, the newest front in a talent war being waged by Silicon Valley’s tech giants as they jostle to gain an edge in the nascent technology.
Amar Subramanya, the former head of engineering for Google’s Gemini chatbot, is the latest to move to Microsoft from its rival, according to a post on his LinkedIn profile on Tuesday. “The culture here is refreshingly low ego yet bursting with ambition,” he wrote, confirming his appointment as corporate vice-president of AI.
Subramanya will join other DeepMind staff including engineering lead Sonal Gupta, software engineer Adam Sadovsky and product manager Tim Frank, according to people familiar with Microsoft’s recruiting. The Seattle-based company has persuaded at least 24 staff to join in the past six months, they added.
Microsoft’s hiring spree comes as tech groups have stepped up a push to poach top AI researchers and engineers from rivals in recent months. This has resulted in a rapid escalation in wages, with OpenAI chief Sam Altman criticising Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg for encouraging “mercenary” behaviour by luring his developers with the promise of $100mn sign-on bonuses.
Recruiting between Microsoft and Google is particularly acute because DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman is now in charge of Microsoft’s consumer AI strategy, putting him at odds with his former partner, Sir Demis Hassabis.
Late last year, Dominic King and Christopher Kelly were poached by Suleyman from DeepMind to run a new AI health unit that has already developed an AI medical system that it says is four times more successful than human doctors at diagnosing complex ailments.
Hassabis has pioneered the use of AI for science and healthcare, winning a chemistry Nobel Prize last year for using the technology to unlock the biological secrets of proteins that underpin life.
Suleyman himself joined in March when Microsoft conducted a so-called “acqui-hire” of most of the staff at his AI start-up Inflection, paying $650mn to license the technology and take most of its staff.
Subramanya and his Gemini engineering co-head Mat Velloso left Google last month, prompting a reshuffle of the group’s AI organisation as it attempts to keep pace with start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are growing in popularity. As revealed in recent court filings, Google’s own internal data estimated that ChatGPT has at least 600mn monthly users for its app, with Gemini trailing at only 400mn.
Velloso has joined Meta as part of the Facebook parent’s move to build a new “superintelligence” team to develop artificial general intelligence. Last month the $1.8tn company invested $15bn into data-labelling start-up Scale AI and hired its co-founder Alexandr Wang to lead this push.
Microsoft declined to comment.
A person close to the matter said DeepMind’s attrition rates are below the industry average and the company has poached a similar number of researchers from Microsoft.
“We are excited that we are able to attract the world’s leading AI talent, including researchers and engineers who come from rival labs,” said Google.
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