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Meta loses top AI people in Silicon Valley

Translate from : Meta mister AI-topfolk i Silicon Valley

Meta has lost three top AI employees within a week in Silicon Valley's continuous battle for talent. Devi Parikh, who was Meta's senior director of generative AI, announced in an X post last week that she had left Meta after more than seven years.

Likewise, Erik Meijer, Meta's senior director of engineering who had led the Instagram owner's machine learning research group, Probability, announced his departure. Meijer said at X: "Given the incredible competitive pressure in the field, there's really no advantage to being at a big company if you want to build cool stuff on top of LLMs." Meijer added that he plans to " do independent research and see where it leads."  

Research scientist Abhishek Das, who worked on Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, also left the company, saying he is "excited to build something new." CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking matters into his own hands to fill in the gaps. He has tried to attract researchers from Google's DeepMind to Meta with personal emails, The Information reported.

Meta has even offered jobs to researchers without conducting interviews first, according to the report, amid a battle for employees with the right expertise that offers big salaries, bonuses and stock. Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of salary data website Levels.fyi, told The Wall Street Journal that the average compensation package for a machine learning and AI engineer at Meta is close to $400,000, citing data they obtained from 344 people.

Elon Musk criticized OpenAI this week, saying the ChatGPT maker has been "aggressively recruiting" Tesla engineers with big salary offers. He said he is increasing the salaries of Tesla's AI engineering team as a result.

"The battle for AI talent is the wildest talent battle I've ever seen!" wrote Musk on X. The Meta layoffs follow an exodus of other AI employees in recent years. At least a third of Meta's researchers with published AI work left the company due to burnout or a lack of faith in the company, The Wall Street Journal reported last June.

Until then, the co-founder of Meta's AI lab, Rob Fergus, left the company in 2020 to join Google's DeepMind.