Databricks executive breaks down the AI talent wars: ‘It’s like looking for LeBron James’

• Databricks’ vice president of AI likened looking for top researchers to “looking for LeBron James.”
• Naveen Rao told Command Line that probably fewer than 1,000 researchers could build frontier models.
• Rao said it wasn’t ridiculous for companies to pay large amounts for AI and infrastructure talent.

Recruiting top-tier AI researchers today is a bit like scouting a sports team’s next star athlete — they’re few in number and costly to recruit, but they can change an organization’s trajectory.

“It’s like looking for LeBron James,” Naveen Rao, Databricks’ vice president of AI, told The Verge’s Command Line newsletter published Friday. “There are just not very many humans who are capable of that.”

While thousands of tech workers and engineers are qualified to work on AI, identifying the best — and convincing them to jump ship — remains a challenge for companies leading the AI race. Rao said he agreed that probably fewer than 1,000 researchers were capable of building new frontier models. But he added that the work of a star AI engineer could have a “massive influence” on a company’s ability to win.

Rao said the AI talent wars weren’t just about “pure AI talent” — they’re also about scaling and building infrastructure for AI models. He said he sees some aspects of the pool expanding in that area.

“When you build a model and you want to scale it, that actually is not AI talent, per se,” Rao told Command Line. “It’s infrastructure talent.”

He added that the scarcity of top AI talent had given researchers “unprecedented” leverage at the companies they work at. While many Americans are navigating an employer-driven job market, cutting-edge AI engineers seem to have the upper hand.

Earlier this year, Perplexity’s CEO described being rebuffed by a Meta engineer who told him to “come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,” the in-demand Nvidia chips needed to develop and scale AI.

As competition increases, companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Microsoft, and Google have ramped up their hiring efforts. AI tech workers have shared stories of CEOs’ extravagant efforts to secure top talent: One worker said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally called to pitch them on joining the team, while a Meta recruit said Mark Zuckerberg showed up in an email thread.

The companies are also offering hefty pay incentives to secure the best talent. Google recently turned heads when it was said to have paid $2.7 billion in a deal to bring Noam Shazeer, the founder of Character.ai, back to the company. While Google didn’t formally acquire Character.ai, it paid to license the startup’s technology, and Shazeer made hundreds of millions from the deal, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Rao said that while the amounts these companies are paying for talent may sound ridiculous, they aren’t. The executive gave an example of a former employee at his company Nervana. He described the employee, who now works at OpenAI, as “the best GPU programmer in the world.” Rao said that programmer’s code now likely powers every inference on OpenAI models and could have saved the company $4 billion.

“I think that’s why you see Google hiring back Noam Shazeer,” Rao said. “It’s very hard to find another Noam Shazeer.”