AI Startup Wave Heats Up, DeepMind Competes Tightly To Bind The Best Engineers In Europe

Googel Deepmind must try to keep the AI engineer. (photo: x @GoogleDeepMind)

JAKARTA - The entry of large numbers of artificial intelligence (AI) startups has made the competition to recruit technical talent in Europe even fierce. This makes companies like Google DeepMind faced with a choice between paying dearly or losing the best experts in the region.

The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT has pumped up the spirit of investors, who have spent money on promising AI startups, looking to find their next surprise success.

Foreign AI companies, including Cohere from Canada and Anthropic and OpenAI from the US, opened offices in Europe last year. This adds to the pressure on tech companies that are already trying to attract and maintain talent in the region.

Founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014, London-based DeepMind has made its name known by implementing AI in everything from board games to structural biology. Now the company is faced with a number of well-funded competitors flooding its territory, while a number of employees leave it to set up their own businesses.

In an effort that appears to reduce the chances of staff joining other companies or starting their own venture, DeepMind provided a number of senior researchers with limited stock access, worth millions of dollars, earlier this year.

According to executive search company Total Fairbank, there has been an "exponential increase" in payments for C-suite staff at AI companies in the UK over the past year. "The entry of foreign AI giants such as Anthropic and Cohere to the London market will further increase competition for AI talent," said Charlie Fairbank, director of the company's management.

According to Fairbank, executives with a base salary of around 350,000 pounds (Rp 6.9 billion) have seen an increase in salaries between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds (Rp993.6 million 1.9 billion).

Cohere, who designed chatbots and other tools for its customers, recruited Phil Blunsom, a major researcher at DeepMind for seven years, as its main scientist in 2022. Sebastian Ruder also joined Cohere from DeepMind in January.

"Jarang was found by companies that built big businesses from scratch, with a lot of frontline thinking in the industry," Ruder was quoted as saying by VOI from Reuters. "When such an opportunity comes, you take it."

Almasque, a common partner at venture capital firm OpenOcean, said that DeepMind is no longer a "leader in its field." "All these companies compete for the same talent pool, and with a shortage of AI skills, it's getting more and more a pool than a ocean," added Ruder.

OpenAI opened its first international office in London last year followed quickly by the second in Dublin. "This is just the first step," said OpenAI Vice President Orang Diane Yoon, as the company plans to continue expanding to other countries.

Cohere opened an office in England last year and CEO Total Gomez told Reuters that he is now dividing his time between the hometowns of Toronto and London, where the company plans to double the number of its employees to 50. "We went where the talent is, and there are a lot in London and across Europe," Gomez said.

The talent war means workers are increasingly having a strong position to demand from their potential employers.

London-based AI audio company ElevenLabs offers stock options, large salaries, and is fully working remotely with new employees, although most of the advertised roles determine that employees should be based in Europe. After recently raising USD 80 million in funding from venture capital firms such as A16z and Sequoia, the company told Reuters it would soon double the total number of their employees to 100.

Paris-based startup Bioptimus, also founded by former DeepMind staff, raised $35 million in February.

Clozel, an early investor at the company, said that Big Tech startups are looking for talent from Big Tech like Google by offering them more influence on the direction of the company. "Google is one of the best in terms of what it does and generates some of the best talent," he said. "At a smaller startup, you have a unique opportunity to stay loyal to your exciting work and share in the company's success."