AI Companies Aggressively Recruting PhD Prospects

Larry Birnbaum, a professor of computer science at Northwestern University was recruiting a promising PhD to become a graduate researcher. Simultaneously, Google was wooing the student.

And when the prospect visited the tech giant’s campus in Mountain View, Calif., the company slated him to chat with its cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai, who are collectively worth about US$ 140 billion and command over 183,000 employees.

"How are we going to compete with that?" Birnbaum asks, noting that PhDs in corporate research roles can make as much as five times professorial salaries, which average US$ 155,000 annually. "That’s the environment that every chair of computer science has to cope with right now."

Though Birnbaum says these recruitment scenarios have been "happening for a while," the phenomenon has reportedly worsened as salaries across the industry have been skyrocketing. The trend recently became headline news after reports surfaced of Meta offering to pay some highly experienced AI researchers between seven- and eight-figure salaries.

Those offers—coupled with the strong demand for leaders to propel AI applications—may be helping to pull up the salary levels of even newly minted PhDs. Even though some of these graduates have no professional experience, they are being offered the types of comma-filled levels traditionally reserved for director- and executive-level talent.

Engineering professors and department chairs at Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, Northwestern, and New York University interviewed by Fortune are divided on whether these lucrative offers lead to a "brain drain" from academic labs.

The brain drain camp believes this phenomenon depletes the ranks of academic AI departments, which still do important research and also are responsible for training the next generation of PhD students.

At the private labs, the AI researchers help juice Big Tech’s bottom line while providing, in these critics’ view, no public benefit. The unconcerned argue that academia is a thriving component of this booming labor market.

In the days before ChatGPT, top AI researchers were in high demand, just as today. But many of the top corporate AI labs, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research), would allow established academics to keep their university appointments, at least part-time. This would allow them to continue to teach and train graduate students, while also conducting research for the tech companies.

While some professors say that there’s been no change in how frequently corporate labs and universities are able to reach these dual corporate-academic appointments, others disagree. NYU’s Bari says this model has declined owing to "intense talent competition, with companies offering millions of dollars for full-time commitment which outpaces university resources and shifts focus to proprietary innovation."