Tech's AI Obsession Is Creating a Workforce Crisis
Tech firms are throwing millions at AI experts while gutting other departments—what happens when the hype fades?
On a Friday afternoon in late 2023, chaos erupted at one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) labs. OpenAI’s board had abruptly ousted CEO Sam Altman, stunning employees and the tech industry. Within hours, rival companies smelled blood in the water. Microsoft reportedly swooped in to court Altman for a new AI venture, and Salesforce publicly offered to match the compensation packages of any OpenAI researcher willing to defect during the turmoil. By Monday, hundreds of OpenAI staff threatened to quit en masse and join Altman if he left for Microsoft. The board quickly reversed course and reinstated Altman, but the message was clear: in the frenzied race for AI talent, opportunism knows no pause. This whirlwind saga, compressing layoffs, poaching and power plays into a single weekend has become emblematic of an industry undergoing rapid and ruthless shifts in hiring and talent acquisition.
Such scenes are no longer rare. Just weeks after the OpenAI episode, another high-profile move made headlines: Mustafa Suleyman co-founder of Google’s DeepMind quit the AI startup he had been running to join Microsoft as CEO of a new AI division. And those were only the splashiest moves. In truth, a quiet war for AI expertise has been escalating across the tech world over the past two years—a war that is reshaping who gets hired, how much they earn, and which companies (and industries, and countries) win or lose.
A Frenzied Race for AI Talent
The demand for AI specialists has skyrocketed, and the supply is struggling to catch up. This imbalance has turned top AI engineers and researchers into the most coveted commodity in tech. Companies are dangling eye-popping rewards to attract them: tech firms now routinely offer compensation packages approaching or exceeding $1 million a year for elite AI talent. These offers include not just high salaries, but also accelerated stock vesting and promises of massive bonuses—perks unheard of a few years ago. Notably, this hiring binge is happening amid broader tech layoffs; even as tens of thousands of workers in other roles were laid off in 2022-2024, those with AI expertise became the exception, protected and fought over. More and more companies are cutting back on traditional roles to pour resources into AI. OpenAI, for example, has reportedly offered candidates median pay nearing $925,000 including equity, and the median compensation for a machine learning engineer at Meta now approaches $400,000 a year with bonuses. These numbers stand out even by tech’s lavish standards.