Google cofounder Sergey Brin personally called an employee who was considering leaving the company for OpenAI, a report says.
Brin's phone call, plus other promises and additional compensation, convinced the employee to stay in his post, The Information reported, citing a "longtime AI researcher" as its source, who said that the Google employee was a friend of theirs.
Brin and Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The unusual move is part of a larger trend among Big Tech companies as they battle it out for AI talent. The pool of top AI talent is still relatively small, but the demand for advanced skills is at an all-time high.
Major tech companies have been attempting to poach each other's top talent, with some offering eyewatering salaries.
Over at Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reportedly been sending personal emails to AI researchers at Google's DeepMind. The company has also been offering candidates jobs without interviews, according to a separate report from The Information.
Zuckerberg announced in January Meta was sitting on a stockpile of Nvidia's highly sought after H100 chips. Zuck told The Verge his company would own more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.
Meta's impressive chip collection is also a valuable recruitment and retention weapon amid the AI talent war.
Aravind Srinivas, the founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI-powered question-and-answer engine, said he failed to poach a Meta employee because his company didn't have enough GPUs.
"I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? 'Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'" Srinivas said on a March episode of the podcast "Invest Like the Best."
