One company seems to be following the opposite path to the rest of the tech companies. Until recently, we were talking about the great wave of layoffs that was taking place in the technology industry. Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, Spotify, ByteDance or IBM laid off hundreds or thousands of their employees in order to reduce costs and balance the bottom line (a financial theory with little basis).
In light of this situation, OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT, has been hiring many former Meta and Google employees in order to bolster the staff that will be responsible for creating an artificial intelligence chatbot.
As echoed by Business Insider, data compiled by LeadGenius and Punks & Pinstripes shows that, of the 200 total employees currently making up OpenAI, 59 are former employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and AI lab Deepmind, and another 34 are former employees of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In addition, the company would also include several former Amazon and Apple employees, according to the data.
Greg Larkin, the CEO of Punks & Pinstripes, a community of 100 executives from the world’s largest companies, told Business Insider that the data collected should serve as a “wake-up call” to big tech companies.
“If nothing else, OpenAI is a sign that Big Tech, especially Google, is not optimizing its investment in its employees. A lot of specialized AI talent has been working on secondary products at innovation labs like Alphabet X. For many, this means they rarely see their work having a significant impact on the company’s core products or profits,” said Larkin.
In fact, OpenAI’s own management team is largely made up of former employees of large technology companies such as Apple, Google and Meta, all of which have departments responsible for researching and developing artificial intelligences.
