Is the AI Talent War About Money or Ethics?

It's about the future. AI has three components. One of them is the data, the second is the hardware, the third is the algorithm. When we talk about the algorithm, we're talking about the talents. Whoever has the talents will control the race for AI. This is why you see companies like Meta paying 200 million dollars for a person. They're looking at, this is going to put me at the top. Welcome back to Silicon Valley Front Row. I'm David Lam, this is Steve Vispas, and we're back again with Ahmed Benafa, professor at San Jose State, and the number one tech voice on LinkedIn. Today we're going to talk about a very interesting subject. Is the AI talent war based on money or ethics? I'm going to bring it up to a professor first. It's about the future. Whoever has the talents will control the race for AI. If you like number one, you control the future. The key thing about it is AI has three components. One of them is the data, the second is the hardware, the third is the algorithm. When we talk about the algorithm, we're talking about the talents. Now, because you're talking about the evolution of the AI, it's happening in less than three years, the speed here is very high, and the opportunities cannot wait for people to take advantage of it. This is why you see companies like Meta paying 200 million dollars for a person. It's not to underestimate the value of that person. They're looking at, this is going to put me at the top, so now I can sell more of my product. By the end of the day, it's a return on investment. At the same time, everybody's looking at me paying that much money to that person, will say, I want to be with this company, because this company is paying a lot of money to the talents. The trend in the valley here is you don't buy one talent, you buy the whole company, and you get all the engineers and everybody there as part of your company. You pay billions of dollars for those companies. We heard stories about that. When we talk about this war, it is a war, but that's not new, because this has been going on in Silicon Valley for years, where you see people from Google is going to Microsoft, Microsoft is going to Meta, Meta is going to LinkedIn. You can see the musical chairs of moving around with the different talents. The importance for Meta to catch up with the artificial intelligence, especially after their Lama model, open source, not catch with the rest of it, nobody's talking about it. Now they realize that, how can I do that? We have the chips, we have the data. Of course, they have the data of the world, they have the chips, they can buy it from NVIDIA. They're missing the third element. This is where they say, I'm going to bring them, I'm going to give them hundreds of millions of dollars so they can join me, just to be within the group that is racing for the top of the AI. Just to clarify, it sounds like this war is more about the money. Correct. Absolutely. It's about return on investment. When you hear about Meta setting up something like $30 billion for the project, for the super intelligence lab, well, 100 million is nothing out of that number. If you can bring somebody who is very famous, somebody who discovered something or wrote something about this, and it's really used everywhere, it's worth it for them. That is how the companies are looking at it, whether it's Google, whether it is open AI and the other companies. We have seen the impact of this war, not on people as much on the companies. Last year, a lot of the engineers who started ChadGBT started receiving huge offers, hundreds of millions of dollars for them to move to Meta, to move to Google. Per person, one person? A person, yeah, one person. I remember that story of this guy, a graduate student in one of the schools, and they offered him $100 million and he said no. This for a year or for a contra, like a basketball player or something? That's a year, that's a salary. Then Mark Zuckerberg said he's not happy with it. He called him and told him, I'm going to double it for you, $200 million, and he accepted. But back to the open AI, a lot of the engineers left open AI because of the offers they have, and that slowed down the release of ChadGBT5. It's supposed to be out in the summer. It was released with less features because the creators are not there anymore. You see how it's really impacting them. Now open AI is fighting with the same weapon, bringing people, and they're giving them shares in the company, so they can, whenever they go public, they're going to be billionaires, not millionaires. Exactly the same thing goes with Meta, exactly the same thing goes with Google. The war here about it, I want to have the best brains of AI so I can have my product is the only product used in the market, because I know that could be in any place. The release of, for example, Gemini Enterprise, which is a certain version of Gemini that can be used for the companies where they can go and search their databases and have intelligent answers. The same thing goes with Meta, when they have different products of their llama. The same thing goes with open AI, when they have one for the government, one for the education.edu.gov product. It's not just about us using it every day asking something, it's the organization, the enterprise, the government, and the governments that are going to do that. So it just sounds really intense, this level of competition to get through this AI development race. So I kind of want to go back a little bit to this diagram of the circular AI deals. So if Meta and similar companies are trying to get their way into this, but at the same time, the groups that are already here, they must have a strong connection with each other and kind of trust, right? So where does this competition, how does it interfere with this cycle? How cutthroat is it? It's up to the individual to lead. Of course. If they have good offer from them. If you receive a phone call from Mark Zuckerberg, I want you to be part of my team, for example, or you receive a call from the CEO of Google, or you receive an offer from them saying that, okay, whatever you're doing now, I'm going to make it 10 times. Come and join us. We need you. Now, does it hurt that partnership? So here there's like a family or whatever, right? Does it hurt? Does it hurt? It's up to them to match it or make it. And a good example of this is a famous AI engineer from Apple that received an offer from Meta, which is a hundred million dollars. And then talk to Apple, Apple said, no, we're not going to match it. So move to Meta. So the important thing here is we're not dealing with buying a company in this private club we are talking about. Just go to the level of the engineers. And you go to the level of engineers, you can pick and choose some of those engineers. There are actually five engineers that in Germany, there's a big lab that belongs to open AI in Germany. Meta managed to go there and get them. So how does that happen? And this is actually an article about it. For example, they look at the top publications about artificial intelligence. They look at who published that and what's the impact and how many citations. And if there is an application for this, they have the top hundred. And now this list is a list where Meta will go and say, I need number one and two and three and four and five, regardless how much money this person asking for. Google look at it and say, I want this engineer, I want this developer. And this is how they get them to join. That's pretty amazing. It sounds in a way like sports or celebrities, that this whole concept of this unbelievable salaries that's from, you know, it's moving into the tech industry. And what we're trying to build the best team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just like sports or the dream team. Now, I think we should talk about the other side, which is the people who get laid off. And so you have the hundred million dollar engineer here, and then the ones who get laid off and probably can't get another job where they have to work in retail or something. What are your thoughts overall about layoffs with AI? Well, I got laid off three times. So I've been through the dotcom layoff. I remember, you know, how painful it is. And because you feel that you are in a sense of you're not that important for the company, that's. And it was not the fact, the fact that because my salary was high during that time, I was a young engineer. And and the other two layoffs after that was small companies, medium companies. It's not a pleasant feeling. And, you know, it's it's horrible, you know, and I don't wish it to anybody to go through the cycle of the layoffs. The issue here is the companies always look at the dollar sign and they can increase their revenue by increasing sales and reducing the number of the heads, which is reducing the payroll. The payroll in any company is almost 50 percent of their expenses. So if you hear about a company going through trouble, the first thing they're going to hit is the payroll, because that's the biggest item there. It's it's a dark side of the artificial intelligence, because artificial intelligence is good at three things, making every tax you give it, task you give it to to artificial intelligence. They make it faster, accurate and cheaper. If you talk about buying any kind of software that will help you or integrate, you know, a chatbot in your website. And I test some of them. And one of those companies, big companies, I don't want to name the company, but this company is a telecom company. I don't have to talk to a human about it. Solve my problem. And my problem is not a linear problem. It's not like, well, we have to pay this or this or this will give me a refund or none of this. It's really complicated. And that agent that managed to understand it, managed to go through it, managed to give me a resolution that I'm happy with. Why should hire people if this can be done? Never ask for a holiday. No raise. Never get sick. Right. I can upgrade it any time I want. I can make a thousand of it for for talking to a thousand people at the same time. Well, I had different experiences with these agents, but I guess some some could be good ones. So so talking about the layoff, it's really difficult. You know, there's no question about it now that the saying in Silicon Valley is AI will not take your job. The people who know how to use AI will take your job. So and this is what should be in the mind of people. I mean, some people are at the end of their professional life and it's going to be very difficult to change. But we've seen a situation like this, you know, when we have the Internet, when people say, OK, the Internet, no more libraries, no more TV, no more radio because it's going to everything going to be online. So we don't have to read this. And a lot of people think that it's going to disappear. What's going to happen? We'll have new kind of jobs and it's going to be it's not zero or 100. It's going to be how much share of the market that the artificial intelligence will take the market. You know, you look at the library is still there. It's just using more Internet. That's what it's more convenient. People are really accessing the reading materials much better instead of going there. My days, we used to go through the cards to get that part. But now we don't have to do that. I can read an article in Harvard Library by just accessing this one and get that information or Library of Congress. So new jobs will be created. There will be some casualties of this. There is no question. Every time you go through from an era to another, there will be that percentage where there is no way for them to catch up with the new trend and the old trend does not exist. So this is where is the problem. So the big question is, how big is the casualty? How many will be the casualty? Question for our audience is, are you worried about being laid off as your job will become obsolete and AI will take over? Please put your comments below. Thank you.