Silicon Valley trades researchers like football teams poach players

7 hours ago 3

The tech industry is in a high-flying war over who can dole out more millions to attract artificial intelligence specialists. Individual researchers, most equipped with PhDs in computer science, are commanding giant salaries and mammoth signing bonuses in hiring negotiations. You might call them talent. The Washington Post called them Olympians in a recent headline: “Why AI superathletes could be winning $100 million bonuses in Silicon Valley.” These are the most sought-after employees in the world.

Tech companies are tasking the star players of their AI squads with developing technology that can outperform humans in any task, a goal known as “artificial general intelligence”, or with creating AI models that surpass human intelligence overall, an objective known as “superintelligence”.

In pursuit of these grails, Silicon Valley is throwing around amounts of money that could found dynasties. The scramble is so desperate and remunerative that the poaching of individual researchers makes news, though they may have been unknown before now. A headline in Wired: “Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta”. In Bloomberg: “Meta Hires Two Key Apple AI experts After Poaching Their Boss.” In the Information: “Anthropic Hires Back Two Coding AI Leaders From Cursor Developer Anysphere”. All of these stories were published in the past week.

The tech press’ furor over these researchers reminds me of sports media covering the trades of star players. The dissection of their pay, the speculation about who’s next on Meta’s list, the playing of one company off another, the discussion of each company’s team composition or overall strategy and the attention to this individual player or that one are all redolent of the scrutinized trade of US basketball phenomenon Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks to the Los Angeles Lakers, for example.

The word “Another” in Wired’s headline is a cue that one company is fueling this frenzy: Meta. Mark Zuckerberg has made eye-popping claims about his firm’s spending over the past week. He said that his company will spend “hundreds of billions” of dollars on its artificial intelligence efforts. In April, Meta revised its planned capital expenditure for this year alone upward to a range of $64bn to $75bn. The company’s previous range was $60bn to $65bn. In 2023, Meta’s capex was a measly $28bn, according to Fortune.

Zuckerberg is backing his pledges with cash. In early July, Meta hired away the leader of Apple’s AI models team, Ruoming Pang, with a jumbo-sized pay package worth some $200m. The researcher joins Meta’s Superintelligence team, perhaps the most expensive team of engineers since the Manhattan Project.

Putting this trading frenzy in perspective is one Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who made the point early last week that half of the top AI researchers in the world reside in China. Huang made the remark in Beijing, where he was attending a conference and celebrating Donald Trump’s new allowance for Huang’s extremely profitable company to sell its most advanced semiconductors in China, where there is strong demand for them. Previously, Nvidia’s chips had been subject to strict export restrictions. Huang’s nod to China’s stock of AI researchers highlights the fact that American firms are pouring money into a pool of English-speaking talent that may yet be outclassed by its competition across the Pacific, no matter how much the tech giants pay.

A spate of iPhone and Samsung alternatives make a play for your pocket

Nothing Phone 3 review - glyph helicopter

Several companies have created phones in recent years attempting to provide alternatives to the industry’s biggest players, in some cases capitalizing on growing anxieties over how smartphones are dominating our lives or simply attempting to rebel against the monopolistic hold Apple and Samsung have over the market.

One option is a device newly released in the UK by Sage Mobile, which is an iPhone 16 loaded with custom software that prohibits internet searches, gaming downloads and social media apps like Instagram. As UK technology editor Robert Booth writes, the bespoke handset costs more than double a standard UK iPhone contract and is marketed at children with the selling point of helping them “reconnect with real life”:

The devices will include an app store that is curated by Sage Mobile and will only allow users access to apps for tasks like banking, public transport, schooling, calendars and weather.

Experience with a similar device sold in the US showed children used it for between 15 minutes and an hour a day, instead of average screen time in the UK of almost three hours a day among eight to 14-year-olds. Kaspar said children lose interest in it because “it’s not as magical, it’s not as fun”, resulting in many reclaimed “life hours”.

An anonymous 16-year-old reviewer gave the phone a test run for the Guardian, finding that using Sage highlighted just how dependent their social life was on the myriad of apps and platforms they had grown up on. Although they felt more productive and spent more time talking with their family, creating a clean severance between online and offline life was more complicated than simply blocking your apps:

The people at Sage said it could take a month to get used to the limitations, but I don’t have that long to test it. I can already tell you that if you are a teenager you are going to feel disconnected from all of your friends and the rest of the world and that feels unfair. Having TikTok and Instagram is the way the world is wired now. If you take them away then it’s quite hard to stay in the loop.

If I stayed with this phone I would also end up feeling left out when speaking in real life to my friends as this is where so many of our sayings and jokes come from.

The London-based company Nothing takes a different tack with its device, the minimally named Phone 3. Rather than a restricted or pared-down version of an iPhone or Android it is an attempt to create a design-forward, quirky phone with touches like a tiny LED screen on the back of its transparent semi-transparent case.

Built off Nothing’s version of an Android operating system, the phone carries much of the functionality but with unique elements that try to differentiate it from Apple and Samsung’s ubiquitous devices. As consumer technology editor Samuel Gibbs writes in his four out of five stars review, you’ll need to really prize that differentiation to make it worthwhile:

The Phone 3 is a good but not great Android from Nothing. It is more interesting than rivals, but you have to actively want something different for it to make sense as you can easily get better-performing and longer-lasting handsets at about this price.

This 2024 photo provided by MP Materials shows an aerial view of the company’s mine in Mountain Pass, California.

In his pledge to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on AI, Zuckerberg said his company was at work constructing a data center nearly as big as Manhattan. The enormous complex, brought to life by Meta’s equally humongous capital expenditure, will be named after Hyperion, a Greek titan who personified the sun. Zuckerberg christened a second, smaller data center Prometheus after the titan who brought humans fire and was punished eternally for stealing sacred knowledge from the gods on Mount Olympus. Is the data center the titan bringing us the fire? Or are we, the human beings who have created AI, the titan? If so, what will our punishment be? Whatever the feelings the name inspires in you, Zuckerberg has made yet another declaration of titanic ambition. The novel Frankenstein has a second, less famous title that seems relevant: The Modern Prometheus.

Google is also expanding its earthly ambitions, with a $3bn hydropower deal and a plan to invest $25bn in data centers across Pennsylvania and neighboring states over the next two years. Apple, too, is leaving its mark with a $500m deal for rare earths minerals that it struck with a US mining company.