Demand for AI talent turns staid conference into recruiting frenzy

Actors in robot costumes stood in the lobby of the Westin hotel in Long Beach, Calif., “Intel Inside” stickers displayed on their foam torsos. People posed for selfies before heading to a ballroom decorated with purple neon lighting and white leather furniture for an event that was more party than technology panel discussion.

The Sunday night event was one of many attempts by Intel and other corporations to curry favour with artificial-intelligence researchers attending one of the world’s biggest AI conferences, turning what was once an academic event into a recruiting frenzy more akin to the NFL’s draft day.

Tech companies increasingly are competing with one another, as well as banks and hedge funds, to hire experts in AI techniques like neural networking, a kind of machine learning loosely based on how the human brain works. These are the skills behind recent advances in computers’ ability to identify objects in images, translate languages, drive cars and spot financial fraud. Conferences like this week’s one on Neural Information Processing Systems, aka NIPS, are where companies can go to hire the talent they need.

NIPS began 30 years ago, and as recently as 2013, fewer than 2,000 people attended. This year, it attracted more than 7,500. Conference tickets sold out in 12 days compared with six weeks last year. And yet demand continues to far exceed supply.

“With talent this scarce, it can be hard to find people,” said Chris Rice of Intel’s AI group. “You’ve got to reach out to people at events like this. This is the biggest event for AI for the year, so you have to be here.”

That scarcity has driven up salaries. Newly minted PhDs earn north of US$300,000 and top-ranked senior academics command multimillion-dollar, multi-year contracts. Salaries at DeepMind, an AI company owned by Alphabet Inc., averaged US$345,000 in 2016, according to U.K. regulatory filings. That soaring compensation has changed NIPS, which once brought together a few hundred academics in a small hotel conference space, with little corporate sponsorship and no press attention.

Bemoaned by some, applauded by others, the transformation follows a similar path as other areas like the internet and bitcoin, that began as wonky technical fields only to become lucrative battlegrounds for billionaires and corporations.

This year, in a cavernous convention hall, eager students, new graduates and experienced academics thread their way between booths, grabbing swag — free T-shirts, water bottles and fidget spinners — and chatting with recruiters from corporations such as Google, DeepMind, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon.com, Uber Technologies, Airbnb, Netflix and Snap. The conference drew 54 corporate sponsors this year compared with 16 five years ago.

Startups and less-well known AI firms are present too along with a growing contingent of financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and hedge fund firms like Man Group PLC’s AHL division. (Bloomberg LP, parent of Bloomberg News, sponsors the conference and uses it to recruit machinelearning experts, too.)

IBM interviewed candidates back-to-back all day long. “It’s extremely competitive, especially for getting experts on neural networks,” Dario Gil, head of IBM’s AI research, said.

Xavier Amatriain, cofounder of AI startup Curai and a Netflix alum, said Amazon has tried an unusual tactic to recruit him at NIPS. “Amazon knows that I’m a runner so invited me to their morning running group,” he said. “It’s a way of getting connected, so they are going to try to hire you while you’re running.” Much of the real action takes place in the evening at private parties corporations host at swank clubs and restaurants for invitees they are particularly keen on wooing. Conference organizers have had to plead with corporate sponsors not to hold events before 9 p.m., for fear of drawing too many attendees away from the official business each evening: academic “poster talks” in which researchers discuss their papers for hours in front of a poster summarizing their work.

Other firms have taken a lower-key, soft-sell approach. “We find having a quiet conversation about goals and philosophy is always preferable to a crowded booth or hectic party,” said Dileep George of San Franciscobased AI company Vicarious.

Corporate recruiting at NIPS and elsewhere worries some academic computer scientists. Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, is among those who fear a brain drain. “It’s a question for the whole ecosystem — who is going to train the next generation?” he said.

Isabelle Guyon, a professor at the University Paris-Saclay, was co-chair of this year’s conference. She said she had mixed feelings about the increased corporate presence. While sad to see the atmosphere become less academic, the companies “provide jobs for our graduates and inspiration for our researchers.”

Alex Smola, director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services, said corporate AI hiring is having the opposite impact — rather than brain drain, it’s drawing more smart people into the field. You can see that at NIPS this year, he said.

When Smola finished a degree in the 1990s, he threw a graduation party at NIPS and invited about half the attendees. There were 150 to 200 people and he knew everyone. “If I tried inviting half of NIPS to a party, this wouldn’t work any more because it’s 7,000 to 8,000 people now,” he said. “It’s probably 20 times as many smart people who have joined.”