Google’s talent retention metrics are ‘healthy’: Sundar Pichai shrugs off AI talent wars

As Silicon Valley’s AI hiring war escalates, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has downplayed the impact on the company’s ability to attract and retain key talent.

Speaking on Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call, Pichai said Google’s internal metrics on AI recruitment and retention remain “healthy,” despite growing concerns from analysts about the rising cost of staying at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

“We continue to look at both our retention metrics, as well as the new talent coming in, and both are healthy,” Pichai said. “I do know individual cases can make headlines, but when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing well through this moment.”

His remarks come as Meta, OpenAI, and a wave of well-funded AI startups increasingly poach researchers from Google, including its DeepMind and Gemini AI teams. A recent SignalFire report found that a Google researcher is 11 times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the other way around. Meta has also pulled talent from Google, including Pei Sun, who previously worked on the Gemini AI assistant and Waymo’s autonomous driving stack.

The tech industry’s red-hot competition has pushed compensation into uncharted territory. Meta reportedly offered a total package exceeding $200 million to recruit Apple’s Ruoming Pang to its newly created Superintelligence division. Other top hires at Meta are believed to have received similar nine-figure offers, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously warning of $100 million signing bonuses being offered to his staff.

While some tech leaders like Reid Hoffman have defended these offers as economically rational, others have expressed concern. Michael Dell recently warned that such pay gaps could create internal friction, saying: “If people feel they’re not treated fairly, that’s going to be a problem.”

Pichai, however, suggested that retention isn’t only about money. Access to top-tier compute resources and the opportunity to work on cutting-edge research continue to be key motivators for AI talent, he said. “The mission, and how state-of-the-art the work is, matters. So that’s super important to them,” Pichai added.

Still, competitors are not slowing down. OpenAI, for instance, recently hired four senior engineers from Tesla, Meta, and xAI, including David Lau, Tesla’s former VP of software engineering, and two infrastructure engineers who helped build xAI’s 200,000-GPU Colossus supercomputer. The engineers are now working on OpenAI’s Stargate initiative, a massive infrastructure project to power future AI systems.

With major players now trading researchers like professional athletes and offering compensation once reserved for tech founders and hedge fund managers, it’s clear that the road to artificial general intelligence won’t just be paved with breakthroughs, but with paycheques.