Meta lost three top AI employees in a week, amid the ongoing battle for talent in Silicon Valley.
Devi Parikh, who was senior director of generative AI at Meta, said in a statement Message last week, she left Meta after more than seven years.
Erik Meijer, its senior director of engineering who had led Instagram owner Probability’s machine learning research team, also announced his departure.
He said on
Meijer added that he plans to “do some independent research and see where it leads.”
Searcher Abhishek Daswho worked on Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, also left the group, saying he was “excited to build something new.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking matters into his own hands to fill the gaps. He tried to lure Google’s DeepMind researchers into joining the company with personal emails, The Information reported.
Meta even offered jobs to researchers without conducting prior interviews, the report said, amid a fight for workers with the right expertise, offering high salaries, bonuses and equity.
Zuhayeer Musa, co-founder of salary data site Levels.fyi, told the Wall Street Journal that the median pay for a machine learning and AI engineer at Meta is close to $400,000, citing data obtained from 344 people. .
Elon Musk spoke to OpenAI this week and said the ChatGPT maker has been “aggressively recruiting” Tesla engineers with significant salary offers. He said he would increase the salaries of Tesla’s AI engineering team accordingly.
“The war for talent for AI is the craziest war for talent I’ve ever seen!” Musk wrote about X.
Meta’s departures follow an exodus of other AI employees in recent years. At least a third of Meta researchers who published work on AI left the company due to burnout or a lack of trust in the company, the Wall Street Journal reported last June.
Before that, Meta AI Lab co-founder Rob Fergus jumped ship in 2020 to join Google’s DeepMind.
Meta did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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