Microsoft has taken a page from Meta’s book by poaching artificial intelligence researchers from rivals. It has reportedly hired around two dozen staff from Google’s DeepMind AI arm in recent months. The ex-Googlers will join Microsoft AI, the team responsible for developing consumer such AI products as Copilot, Bing AI, and other generative AI experiences, an anonymous source told CNBC.
The lab is led by Mustafa Suleyman, who co-founded DeepMind before Google acquired it in 2014 and only left the company in 2022. Others who recently jumped ship from Google to Microsoft include the following:
Amar Subramanya: Worked at Google for 16 years, including five years as Vice President of Engineering, focusing on Gemini. Now, he is a Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft AI.
Adam Sadovsky: Worked at Google for 17 years as a software engineer and Senior Director. Now, he is a Corporate Vice President of AI at Microsoft AI.
Sonal Gupta: Worked at Google DeepMind for one year, after six years as Senior Engineering Manager at Meta. Now, she is a technical staff member at Microsoft AI.
Jonas Rothfuss: Worked at Google DeepMind for one year. Now, he is a technical staff member at Microsoft AI.
The hiring spree comes after a series of layoff announcements from Microsoft. It eliminated approximately 9,000 roles across various business units, including its sales and Xbox gaming divisions, earlier this month, following over 6,000 layoffs to reduce management layers in May.
Competition is driving market changes
Notably, Microsoft has spent tens of billions on data centres and AI development that it needs to recoup, and is writing up to 30% of coding projects with generative AI.
That being said, aggressive spending on AI infrastructure and talent is by no means unique to Microsoft. All the tech giants are locked in an escalating race to dominate AI, as whoever controls the most powerful, widely adopted AI platforms stands to shape the technology’s future and reap both economic and geopolitical influence.
Google has struck a deal with AI coding startup Windsurf valued at approximately $2.4 billion, which includes bringing on its CEO and several team members for its DeepMind division. Mark Zuckerberg has built a new AI research team at Meta, dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, and was reportedly offering $100 million signing bonuses to persuade engineers to jump ship from rivals like OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
Meta invested $14.3 billion in data-labelling startup Scale AI and poached its CEO to lead the new division. Zuckerberg reportedly also secured Apple’s top AI executive, Ruoming Pang, with a compensation package worth over $200 million, and is spending hundreds of billions to build two massive data centres.
Aside from flinging money at custom chips, data centres, and promising startups, the tech giants are also trying to lure the best AI researchers by showing the mettle of their models. Both Google DeepMind and OpenAI have claimed that their latest AI systems have achieved gold-medal level performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
While it is furiously building its in-house AI team, Microsoft is not letting go of its partnership with OpenAI. In fact, it has recently been vying for a larger stake in Sam Altman’s startup.