Top AI researchers have more in common with Steph Curry than you might think.

At least according to Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, who compared the feverish AI talent wars to the scramble for sports stars on an episode of the podcast "Decoder" that aired July 17.

"It's definitely going to feel like a transfer market now, like an NBA or something," he said of the effort to recruit AI researchers. "There's going to be a few individual stars who are having so much leverage."

As Big Tech companies offer eye-popping salaries and CEOs personally recruit AI talent, Srinivas said that companies need to ensure that employees are motivated by mission as well as money.

"You're encountering new kinds of challenges. You feel a lot of growth, you're learning new things. And you're getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go just because you have some guaranteed payments?" he said.

Srinivas said that he was "surprised by the magnitude" of the salaries Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering to top AI researchers, adding that it "seems like it's needed at this point for them." With the massive salaries, Srinivas said "failure is not an option" for Meta's new team — and that anything other than success would look pretty bad for Zuckerberg.

It's not just Meta that's trying to poach top talent. The hiring spree is motivated both by the limited pool of top researchers and engineers and nearly unfathomable resources at the biggest tech companies, as BI previously reported.

Srinivas isn't the first to make the basketball metaphor: Databricks' vice president of AI compared recruiting a top researcher to "looking for LeBron James."

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