This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
Recruiting AI talent can be a difficult undertaking for some companies.
Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI-powered question-and-answer engine, described his interaction with a job candidate that shows how difficult it can be to hire people with generative AI capabilities.
“I tried to hire a very experienced Meta researcher, and you know what they said? ‘Come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'” Srinivas said on a recent episode of the business consulting podcast “Invest Like the Best.” “
H100 GPUs refer to Nvidia’s highly coveted graphics processing units that tech giants like Meta, OpenAI, and Google use in their data centers to power and train their AI chatbots.
“It will cost billions and will take five to 10 years to get it from Nvidia,” Srinivas said.
Limited funding, combined with a chip shortage, means Perplexity, which powers its question-and-answer engine using GPT-4, has found it difficult to find the talent needed to create a large language model, Srinivas said.
Srinivas said it’s difficult to convince employees to leave a company where “they have a lot of experimentation and existing models to build on.”
“You have to offer extraordinary incentives and immediate availability of compute. And we’re not talking about small compute clusters here,” he said.
The CEO added that even if smaller companies like Perplexity managed to get Nvidia’s chips, they would still be left behind because artificial intelligence is developing so quickly.
Srinivas said that AI talent at major tech companies “will have already built the next-generation model.”
“They say, ‘Look, the world has changed, I’m already in the next generation,’” he added. “‘I will come when the next version of the model has finished training. This time, you will come back to me when you have 20,000 H100.'”
Srinivas and Meta did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment prior to publication.
There has been a rapid increase in interest in AI skills like machine learning and data engineering since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Meta have offered salaries of up to $ 900,000 per year to attract generative and non-generative AI talent. Tech companies in the education, healthcare and legal sectors have sought to fill roles with workers who know how to use artificial intelligence.
Srinivas believes workers need skills that go beyond the ability to create AI models that generate desirable outcomes.
“You have to train them later and deal with the long tail of problems that come with serving a product,” the CEO said.
Post-training skills, such as knowing how to reduce a chatbot’s factual inaccuracies, are an important skill that employees in a wide range of digital industries can learn quickly, Srinivas said.
Leaning on this skill set, he said, will help AI companies like Perplexity stand out in an industry dominated by Big Tech.
“You have a huge advantage in creating a lot of value,” he said of post-training skills. “And we are focused on that.”