The war for AI talent is intensifying.
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Microsoft (MSFT) has reportedly hired around two dozen employees away from Google parent company Alphabet’s (GOOGL) DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) research lab in the latest escalation among technology giants vying for talent to drive their AI applications and models.
Amar Subramanya, who worked at Google for 16 years, most recently as a vice president of engineering for the Gemini digital assistant, has posted on LinkedIn that he’s joined Microsoft’s AI team as a corporate vice president. The Microsoft group works on the company’s consumer-oriented Copilot AI assistant, as well as the Bing search engine.
War for Talent
In June of this year, Adam Sadovsky, who spent nearly 18 years at Google as a software engineer and senior director at DeepMind, left for Microsoft. He’s now a corporate vice president at Microsoft AI. Other Google DeepMind staff who have decamped for Microsoft’s AI team include Sonal Gupta, an engineering lead, and Jonas Rothfuss, a research scientist.
The war for AI talent comes as the world’s largest technology companies poach each other’s staff with mind-boggling salaries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that rival Meta Platforms (META)
has offered the start-up company’s employees up to $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship. Alphabet hired the CEO and other employees of AI coding start-up Windsurf in a massive $2.4 billion deal.
Microsoft’s new hires are joining its AI group as the company pours greater resources into the technology and products it is developing, such as the Copilot assistant. At the same time, Microsoft announced in recent weeks that it is laying off 9,000 employees, representing about 4% of its global workforce, as it realigns resources and staffing priorities. MSFT stock is up 20% this year.
Is MSFT Stock a Buy?
Microsoft’s stock has a consensus Strong Buy rating among 34 Wall Street analysts. That rating is based on 31 Buy and three Hold recommendations issued in the last three months. The average price target on MSFT stock of $547.30 implies 8.32% upside from current levels.
