Matt Walsh, Blue Signal Search founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the intense fight for AI hiring, what prospective workers are asking for, the experience needed for AI jobs, and more.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

Matt Walsh, founder and CEO of Blue Signal Search, described the current AI hiring landscape as highly competitive, with demand for skilled professionals far outstripping supply. He noted that senior machine learning engineers are commanding total compensation packages exceeding half a million dollars, especially in major tech hubs, and are also negotiating for equity, remote work, and other benefits.

Walsh explained that the demand for AI talent extends beyond traditional tech companies, as businesses across all sectors seek to integrate AI into their operations. While entry-level roles offer substantial salaries, the highest compensation is reserved for those with several years of experience and strong technical backgrounds. Walsh emphasized that critical thinking and expertise in machine learning and AI remain highly valued as the field continues to evolve.

Blue Signal Search CEO on hypercompetitive AI hiring

Well, last week, we heard about how OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Mark Zuckerberg was offering some of his employees $100 million signing bonuses to switch teams and even higher salaries. Today, we're talking about the intense fight for AI hiring beyond the tech superpowers. Matt Walsh is the founder and CEO of Blue Signal Search, and he joins us live here at the Nasdaq. And Matt, this is pretty interesting. We hear about the headlines about these huge hundred million dollar signing bonuses. But no matter where you are in AI, there's a there's a real fight that's taking place to get this talent. Right. Oh, it is uber competitive. I've never seen something like this. Even if you look back to the dotcom era. I mean, there is not enough people to fill all these jobs. And it's so competitive and it's driving up the price. They're asking for ridiculous money and they're getting it. It's actually very it's a lot. When you're talking ridiculous money, what does that mean for the average AI person? So the most common role would be like a machine learning engineer. And average could be north of half a million dollars. It's a lot more in the Bay Area, almost double the national average. But this is for a senior machine learning engineer over five, six hundred thousand dollars total package. Wow. They're getting this money. What are they asking for on top of money? Well, they want a lot. So they want equity, usually equity if it's a smaller shop and it's available. Even some of the larger labs, they're offering equity, too. They want compute power, you know, 100 GPUs on signing. I mean, they they're asking for a lot of things and they have to give it just because there's not a lot of them out there. They want to be able to publish. They want flexibility. They want to work remote. They want to have a say in the product. And it's it's great because it's exciting that they can get all these things and really drive it. But the companies are having to offer a lot just to be competitive right now. Who are the companies that are hiring these mostly tech companies or is it reached beyond that at this point? Good question. So every company is technically an A.I. company right now. Everyone's trying to improve their own workflows, their own processes. So they'll try to bring folks in and do some internal type A.I. work. And then, of course, you have your A.I. companies, your large labs. And it's a lot more technical at that aspect of it. But it's all across the board from companies who are offering A.I. to others. And then there's the companies that want it internally. So what kind of experience do you need to get a job that's half a million dollars and some places a million dollars in Silicon Valley? Well, it's interesting because you'd think A.I. has not been around that long, only a couple of years. But the fact is it's been around for a long time. There's been machine learning engineers and the folks that have been going to school for this. They have the experience and there's not a lot of them. And so typically you're looking for four to five. When you think about it, it's only been mainstream for a couple. So that pool is small. Luckily, there's been a lot more folks going to school. I think it's up a third just this last couple of years for folks that are graduating with some A.I. degrees. But typically it's going to be anywhere from four to five years plus. And of course, you need a strong tech background prior to that. So do you get a job like that if you're coming straight out of school? You. Not that high. No. These are senior machine learning engineers straight out of school, though. If you're a Ph.D. and you're learning all these, you can get north of 200, maybe 300 even. So we keep hearing about how A.I. itself is going to do a lot of the coding, a lot of the programming. We used to think if you got out of school and you had a computer programming degree, you were set. That doesn't sound like it's the case as much anymore. How are A.I. machine learning educated people safer than everybody else? Oh, it's a great question. You know, I'm trying to think, what do I tell my kids to go to school for? What should they do? The short answer is I don't know. But what I speculate, anything machine learning, A.I., large language models. What happened is back in the day you were competing over Java, Python coders. They'd come in and they were reaching top dollar. Whatever they wanted, you had to give it to them. Now with A.I., it will code in any language you want. And so you can be much more efficient when you're putting these codes together. And I've seen speakers you've had before that we don't need these software developers anymore because we can have one or two people run all these agents and build this out. And so right now, I think it's just the critical thinking, understanding how operations and workflow work with all these technologies, which is also changing daily. So I'd say anything in that analytical mindset with the machine learning, learning A.I. is probably the safe bet. That's what I'm telling my kids anyways.

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Kyiv

Ukraine Invasion

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Jerusalem

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Blue Signal Search CEO on hypercompetitive AI hiring

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Rise of AI