Microsoft $MSFT reportedly has poached around two dozen staff from Google $GOOGL DeepMind, Alphabet’s artificial intelligence research unit, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.
Corroborating the report, Amar Subramanya, a 16-year Google veteran and former vice president of engineering working on the Gemini AI assistant, announced via LinkedIn on Tuesday that he had joined Microsoft AI as a corporate VP. His new team is focused on the AI-powered assistant Copilot that responds to natural language prompts, as well as the Bing search engine.
Subramanya follows several senior figures from Google who have already jumped ship. In June, Adam Sadovsky — who spent nearly 18 years at Google and was most recently a senior director and distinguished engineer at DeepMind — also moved to Microsoft AI as a corporate VP. Jonas Rothfuss, a former research scientist at DeepMind, and Sonal Gupta, a former engineering lead, both serve as "technical staff members" at Microsoft AI as of May and June respectively.
The latest hires come as competition for top AI talent heats up. Meta $META has been on a multibillion-dollar hiring spree as it builds its research lab dedicated to pursuing “superintelligence,” a hypothetical AI system that exceeds the powers of the human brain.
The company has invested $14.3 billion into data annotation start-up Scale AI, The Information reported last month. As part of the deal, its 28-year-old founder and CEO Alexander Wang joined Meta, alongside several of its senior staffers. Meta also has succeeded in recruiting GitHub CEO Nat Friedman to join the lab.
Sources also told The Information that Meta has been offering seven- to nine-figure compensation packages to top employees working for its rivals. Speaking on his brother’s podcast last month, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, revealed that some of his employees had been offered $100 million bonuses to jump ship. “It is crazy. I'm really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them up,” he added.