Tech is in a global ‘war for AI talent’ against China – and China is winning

There’s a global AI talent war underway and it’s only getting worse. 

That’s according to Vijay Karunamurthy, CTO of Scale AI, who said there’s intense and growing competition for the most highly qualified AI talent, needed to advance the technology quickly and efficiently.

“We are really in a war for AI talent right now, and we’re fighting in this war against China. Private companies are fighting also. The public sector needs really smart AI experts to be able to evaluate these technologies. But in the middle of this AI talent war, we need an incredibly high concentration of the right qualified people in certain roles in order to push this technology forward.” 

Vijay (pictured above) was speaking at Collision in Toronto, where he noted one particular difference in hiring trends in AI, compared to other tech sectors:

“The other challenge we’re seeing right now is, compared to hiring for traditional software engineering, this new technology is so different from what I’m used to in my past, the people that come in have really interesting perspectives. It’s not just computer science, but they have backgrounds in philosophy or psychology. “

Vijay also addressed the general public’s reservations regarding the rapid evolution of Ai:

“There’s a pervasive view out there, a negative and fearful pervasive view out there amongst the general public. You know, some of that fear is founded and we need to have an open and transparent discussion about what the risks are of these models.

“It’s important for us to make this a core principle of how we talk as a society about this technology. And we should be sharing open and transparent benchmarks that show how these models do on issues of safety, cybersecurity, [issues] with really serious risks like nuclear proliferation or biosafety… We need to understand where that breaking point is, so once we’re able to have that discussion open way, I think that’s how we out-compete other societies that are less transparent about this.

“And I point to China as one example, where they are in some ways winning a really competitive war for AI talents… [Because] there’s a lot of really impressive researchers out there, and they’re able to work with training data that we might not have access to. But it’s important for us to be evaluating how these models are performing as we fight that war, and understand what the risks are if we deploy this technology.”

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:
● Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
● Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
● Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
● Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
● Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
● Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
● Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
● Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
● Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
● Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

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Useful links
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
About Web Summit: about.websummit.com