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Peter Deng has worked at OpenAI, Facebook, and Google. He even interned at Microsoft. Now, all of his former employers are fighting for AI talent — creating a widening compensation gulf along the way.
The AI talent wars have bestowed a small number of researchers with ballooning compensation packages and fast-moving competitive offers. Deng doesn’t work at any of these companies anymore — he’s since left to serve as general partner at Felicis — but he does see a growing corporate divide.
On the “Unsupervised Learning” podcast, the former OpenAI VP of consumer product said that the talent wars were expanding the salary gap.
“I think it does have second-order effects,” Deng said. “There are some people who are not researchers who feel like they’re contributing a bunch to the product or the company or bringing a ton of value, but the discrepancy in salaries and RSUs and all that is becoming wider and wider.”
Deng said that “HR departments will have to address [it] at some point.”
AI researchers are like star athletes in the tech arms race ignited by the rise of ChatGPT. Top talent is highly sought after by major tech players like OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI and more. Indeed, Databricks’ VP of AI Naveen Rao analogized the talent wars to “looking for LeBron James.”
AI companies have been competitively poaching researchers and engineers over the last year. In 2024, Google struck a $2.7 billion deal with Character.ai, with the primary goal reportedly being to bring back Noam Shazeer. At the time, Conor Grennan, chief AI architect at NYU’s Stern School of Business, told Business Insider that Shazeer was the “star quarterback.”
But, like in sports, there are the haves and have-nots. For every LeBron James, there’s also a benchwarmer who’s making significantly less money even though they’re involved in team workouts and practices.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has looked to prevent a talent exodus as Meta and other companies circle his employees, has spoken out about the hiring attempts and eye-watering pay packages. In June, he told his brother that these extreme poaching techniques could create a poor company culture.
“The strategy of a ton of upfront guaranteed comp and that being the reason you tell someone to join, like really the degree to which they’re focusing on that and not the work and not the mission, I don’t think that’s going to set up a great culture,” said Altman, who has seen some of his employees depart for rivals.
Even if the talent wars are widening salary gaps, Deng still thought of them as a positive overall. The winners, he said, are “everyone else” — the “investors and other startup founders” who benefit from the push toward general superintelligence.
“I trust the market because it’s very clear that this research talent is so important to get right for each of these big labs,” Deng said. “It is absolutely imperative for each of these labs to make sure they retain and recruit each other’s talent.”
Retaining the talent might be their biggest struggle yet. Mark Zuckerberg poured billions into building Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, dangling multimillion-dollar salaries in front of researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and investing billions in a reverse acquihire as part of a deal to bring aboard Scale AI cofounder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead the new division.
Just two months after launch, at least eight employees have left the company.
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