DeepMind researchers are a hot commodity. Hedge fund Balyasny just hired one
As a plethora of firms look to accelerate their AI research and get out in front of the competition, alumni of certain firms are proving exceedingly valuable. One source of talent is Google DeepMind, which is so sought after that Mark Zuckerberg has been personally emailing researchers to entice them to work at Meta. The latest DeepMind departure, however, has joined a hedge fund instead.
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Su Wang has joined Balyasny as a senior research engineer. He worked at DeepMind for a year after three years working on AI research at parent company Google. Wang's areas of focus include vision-language navigation, text-to-image Generation, and AI model benchmarking.
Wang has a history working with one of Balyasny's recently hired AI heads. Peter Anderson, who joined as head of research for applied AI as we reported in March, previously collaborated with Wang on a 2022 paper called 'Less is more: Generating grounded navigation instructions from landmarks.' Charlie Flanagan, the firm's head of applied AI, is also a Google alum. The applied AI team had 10 researchers and engineers at the start of the year, but now has 13.
Balyasny's AI research cornerstone is BAM ChatGPT, an 'AI equivalent of a senior analyst' released to employees over a year ago. While this might concern Balyasny's young employees who fear being replaced, Flanagan says the bot is more of an editor than a creator, and anticipates that it will relieve 10% of analyst workload.
Elsewhere, DeepMind researchers have been finding new jobs. Zuckerberg's emails may have paid dividends; staff engineer Zhou Fang joined Meta this month, and senior staff research scientist Aakanksha Chowdhery joined the month before. Open AI, one of the top paying firms for AI staff, also hired DeepMind's Gemini human data lead Thibault Sottiaux last month.
Another hedge fund hiring from DeepMind is Squarepoint Capital, which hired staff research engineer Grégoire Delétang in London last month. Interestingly, he has been hired as a quantitative researcher, working on large scale deep learning.
It also often takes a tempting compensation package to bring in DeepMind engineers and others of that ilk. Deepali Vyas, global head of data and AI at Kornferry, says there are only "several hundred people in the valley that are true, true experts." OpenAI has been spotted paying up to $650k in salary alone to hire them. Vyas says that hedge funds are "still going to be paying top dollar for that talent, but they're going to hire fewer people."
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