Mosseri added that this new wave of AI talent looks very different from the traditional Silicon Valley engineer.
“It’s a much more scrappy type of engineer or researcher really than what most of the Valley has historically hired, which are much more like, ‘This is the right way to build a database that serves this many millions of people over this many data centers where there’s a right way to do it, where you could write a PhD about it.’”
“This is not that. There are PhDs about the research, for sure, who work in the research area, but the people who are doing the applied stuff—it’s a small group of people,” he added.
Mosseri said one of the main reasons why salaries have become inflated for seeking out the best AI talent is because it’s not something you could learn in school, because it’s so new.
“A lot of them are in their 20s,” he said. “It’s a bunch of techniques and technologies that are evolving very quickly,” he said.
Mosseri said that while the offers people may read are greatly exaggerated, they are still a lot of money, and there’s a tiny pool of people who can do cutting-edge AI model work.
“There’s an immense amount of competition to hire that talent, which is what’s driving up the cost of hiring these people,” Mosseri said. “Some of these techniques are decades old, but a lot of it is just brand-new and novel, and everyone is learning on the fly.”
