Google DeepMind has lost over two dozen AI developers to Microsoft in the past few months, according to a report by CNBC.
The Windows maker has hired at least 24 former Google staffers to join the AI team within the company that is led by Mustafa Suleyman, who reports to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Interestingly, Suleyman is one of the co-founders of DeepMind which was acquired by Google back in 2014. Demis Hassabis, another DeepMind co-founder, is now at the helm of the Google AI research division. In 2022, Suleyman exited Google to establish his own startup called Inflection. However, he joined Microsoft last year to lead its AI team along with several other employees who had worked with him at Inflection.
The migration of talent from Google to Microsoft comes amid a rapidly intensifying AI talent war. It also follows Microsoft’s announcement earlier this month that it was laying off around 9,000 employees or around 4 per cent of its global workforce.
Some of the engineers who have been part of the movement of talent are Amar Subramanya, Adam Sadovsky, Sonal Gupta, and Jonas Rothfuss, among others.
Subramanya reportedly worked at Google for 16 years and most recently served as the vice president of engineering developing the tech giant’s Gemini AI assistant. He has now joined Microsoft AI as a corporate vice president, according to a post on LinkedIn.
Sadovsky’s stint at Google lasted 18 years. His prior position at the company was senior director at DeepMind. He is now a corporate vice president at Microsoft AI.
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Until June this year, Gupta was an engineering lead at Google DeepMind. Now, her LinkedIn profile says that she is a member of the technical staff on Suleyman’s Microsoft AI team.
After a year as an AI research scientist at DeepMind, Rothfuss also joined Microsoft AI in May this year as part of its technical staff. While Microsoft does not appear to have actively poached these individuals, it underscores how AI researchers and engineers are increasingly being traded like star athletes.
Among the big tech companies, Meta stands out as the most aggressive in poaching talent.
The social media giant recently hired Mark Lee and Tom Gunter, two AI researchers who previously worked at Apple. It has also recruited several employees who previously held roles at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, claimed that Meta was offering the startup’s employees a staggering $100-million signing bonus.
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The AI researchers who have been poached will be part of Meta’s newly formed artificial superintelligence lab that will be led by Alexandr Wang, the co-founder of Scale AI which saw a staggering $14.3 billion investment from Meta last month, along with former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
Meanwhile, Google successfully hired away the CEO of Windsurf as well as a small group of the AI coding startup’s employees in a $2.4 billion deal.