Microsoft Poaches Google A.I. Staff As Talent War Heats Up

Microsoft (MSFT) has hired about two dozen employees from Google parent company Alphabet’s (GOOGL) DeepMind artificial intelligence (A.I.) lab as the war for talent escalates.

The largest technology firms in the world are vying for talent to help drive their A.I. applications and models, in many cases paying huge sums of money to poach scientists and engineers.

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 A.I. team as a corporate vice president.

The Microsoft group works on the company’s consumer-oriented “Copilot” A.I. assistant, as well as the Bing search engine.

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 A.I.

Other Google DeepMind staff who have jumped ship for Microsoft’s A.I. team include Sonal Gupta, an engineering lead, and Jonas Rothfuss, a prominent research scientist.

The war for A.I. talent comes as the world’s largest technology companies poach each other’s staff with massive salaries.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that rival Meta Platforms (META) has offered the start-up company’s employees up to $100 million U.S. signing bonuses to switch companies.

Alphabet itself hired the chief executive and other employees of A.I. coding start-up Windsurf in a $2.4 billion U.S. deal.

Microsoft’s new hires are joining it’s A.I. 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 21% this year and trading at $505.27 U.S. per share.