How Apple & Google CEOs Ended Up Fighting Hard To Hire & Retain Two Ex-IITians

As the race to ace AI heats up amongst the biggest tech companies around the world, the battle seems no longer limited to products like ChatGPT, Bard, etc. Top tech giants seem to be fighting for the best talent in the AI race as well.

Apple & Google Battle For The Top Talent

indiatimes

The race to hire top talent has heated up to the point that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have reportedly fought hard to hire and retain two Indian engineers who are ex-IITians.

Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) chief, John Giannandrea, was facing a tough challenge as his team struggled to keep pace with rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. The team, responsible for developing Siri and other AI and machine learning efforts, is said to be engulfed in turf battles that are hampering their progress. At the center of this entire AI battle is the race to hire the right talent.

A report by US-based media firm The Information claims that three key engineers, Srinivasan Venkatachary, Anand Shukla, and Steven Baker, were hot commodities for both Google and Apple. The trio helped modernise Apple's search technology but left the iPhone maker to work on large-language models (LLMs) at Google.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai personally wooed the trio to join, while the report also claims that Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to persuade the engineers to stay.

Srinivasan Venkatachary had completed a B.Tech. in Computer Science (1992¨C1996) from IIT Madras, whereas Anand Shukla had completed the same degree from IIT Kanpur (1997¨C2011).

Also Read: Not Steve Jobs, This Man Was The First CEO Of Tech Giant Apple

What The Two 'In-Demand' IITians Do

indiatimes

Venkatachary is currently the VP of Engineering, AI Product Expansion at Google, whereas Anand Shukla is a Distinguished Engineer at Google.

According to the LinkedIn pages of the two ex-IITians, Venkatachary left Apple in October 2022, and Shukla left Apple in November 2022. According to the report, the engineers believed that Google was a better place to work on large-language models (LLMs).

All three engineers, including the two ex-IITians, are now working on Google's efforts to reduce the cost of training and improve the accuracy of LLMs and the products based on these models.

Also Read: Apple CEO Tim Cook Shares 4 Traits He looks For In Candidates

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