Talent Tug-of-War: ChatGPT's Strategy in Poaching Google Employees

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0:40And we're actually going to break down the makeup of OpenAI, where they're taking their employees from, and also where they're taking their leadership team from. So this comes on the backs of a recent article in Business Insider that said, chat GPT maker, OpenAI has hired tons of former Google and Meta employees, new data shows. And essentially what they're doing is they are looking at some new data out of lead genius and punks and pinstripes and which essentially break down how OpenAI is being built up. So we're going to dig into why this is important, what the implications of AI are, what the missed opportunities for Google are and kind of how this affects AI going forward into the future.

1:18So I think the first thing to say here is it looks like overall, OpenAI, as far as its employee data goes, right? This is a very new company. They don't have millions or they don't have thousands of employees like a lot of these other big tech giants. But it looks like they have hired so far around 60 people from Google. And that is their number one place that they're currently poaching talent from. Their number two place is meta at 32 people. And then you have Apple, they've stolen 16 people from there, 14 people from Dropbox and 11 people from Amazon. Now what's interesting with meta, Apple and Amazon specifically, I mean, aside from Dropbox, the other three below Google is, and actually Google included, all four of these have very big AI plays that they're currently working on.

2:13So And it kind of begs the question, like, why are these people moving from, you know, like Google, which would seem like an incredibly comfortable job to something in such a new tech startup? And I think the reason is, whenever you have one of these companies come up with a product that is such a blockbuster success, ChatGPT got 100 million active monthly users on month two. People just want to work on something where they feel like their work is being used, where they feel like they're making a difference, they're making an impact. And I think that's what OpenAI is benefiting from. They were the first to market with this really powerful tool.

2:47And it's not like other companies were incapable of producing this. Facebook had a chatbot. Bing apparently and Microsoft have been testing internally their chatbot for years. And Google is the one that pioneered the entire transformer technology back in 2017 that was used to create ChatGPT. So, and, you know, they came out with BARD so quick after ChatGPT, you know they've been just like slow walking this thing because they're worried about how it's going to affect their ad business. So you have to think like these employees that are looking at this incredibly innovative technology, everyone's using it, and they're stuck at, you know, these companies that have been slow walking the technology that have been kind of getting in the way.

3:25And so it's no wonder that these people are moving over. And in addition, another really high-profile person recently was the lead of self-driving or autopilot at Tesla, Andre Carpathi. He recently just announced that he is moving over from Tesla to work at OpenAI. And this comes with a lot of, if you're on Twitter and you are kind of following the space, you're seeing a lot of these engineers that are working at Google Brain are moving over to OpenAI and getting positions there. So it's pretty interesting to see what's happening. Now, I wanted to talk a little bit about the leadership at OpenAI and what percentage of that is coming from different companies.

4:07And there's a really interesting takeaway I got here. But first off, we got five people from Google. So obviously the biggest place they're poaching people from. And I think I believe that Google had the most advanced AI. And the reason for that, second to Bing, or I guess I think they have more data than Bing, but because essentially what these big companies are doing, when you have a search engine like Google or Microsoft's Bing, what you're able to do is you're able to look at, you're crawling the entire web. And when you crawl the entire web, Google knows what's on every single webpage. And all of that data, websites have to opt in.

4:43It's on the privacy policy terms of service that they're allowing Google to crawl their website and essentially look at what data is on their website. And if people opted out and said, no, I don't want Google to crawl my website, that's suicide for a brand, like no one's ever going to find you. And so Google and Microsoft's Bing with their web searchers, their web crawlers have been able to crawl all the data on the, on the internet. And that's how they're able, they're able to make these really, really powerful models. So it's no wonder that Google is, you know, so far advanced in AI, because I don't think there's anyone else that has that vast a library or even that a reason to collect that much information as Google.

5:17So it's, it's a no brainer. Google is very advanced in AI, but they've been slow walking it. And I think people know that. So now they're getting punished for it. So Google, five people from Google are in leadership at OpenAI, three from Facebook. And what's interesting is if you go way down the list, one, it says one person from Meta. So really that's four from Facebook. So Google and Facebook are the top. You got two from Apple, two from Dropbox, two from Stripe, two from Airbnb. They got a bunch of other places, including JP Morgan. And way at the bottom of the list, there's one person from Microsoft that is in leadership at OpenAI.

5:52But I mean, you're comparing that to four from Facebook, five from Google. Like, I kind of wonder if even when you're looking at employees, employees from Microsoft, there's seven employees from Microsoft working at OpenAI, but I mean, compared to almost 60 from Google, Google, and, you know, they kind of poach them from Google's deep mind. This really, to me, kind of says that maybe OpenAI knew that they wanted this Microsoft partnership all along and they intentionally did not poach people from Microsoft. That's one way I could think about it. The other way I could think about it is perhaps Microsoft is bad at AI or they're far behind, or maybe they put all of their eggs in the OpenAI basket and knew that, you know, they had this, some investments in OpenAI from the very beginning and that they could kind of lean on these to pull them ahead in the AI race.

6:41Either way, I mean, they also had the Bing bot they've been testing for a couple of years. So So I think that they were hedging with their own product, investing in OpenAI, and maybe OpenAI was the hedge and that just took the lead. And so now they're just running with it. So I think if nothing else, you know, people have been commenting on this. Larkin recently said, if nothing else, OpenAI is a sign that big tech, especially Google, isn't optimizing its investment in its employees. A lot of AI talent has been working on secondary products in innovation labs like Alphabet X. and for many this means that they rarely see their work have a meaningful impact on the company's core product or earnings, right?

7:22You just don't feel like you're making an impact when you're working in these kind of like moonshot labs at these big huge companies and your work doesn't ever get implemented into the actual product or make money.