- Major tech companies are battling for AI dominance, pouring tens of billions into infrastructure and offering sky-high compensation packages. Billionaire investor Mark Cuban notes this new phase will see firms locking down valuable AI innovations and expertise rather than sharing them.
Major tech companies are in a fierce competition to be at the forefront of AI by recruiting top talent, massively investing in research and development and infrastructure, and scooping up smaller startups left and right.
This so-called AI war is about to become even more aggressive.
“What people are missing about AI, [in my opinion], is no company is going to spend what will end up being more than a trillion dollars and accept not being dominant,” Mark Cuban wrote Sunday on X. “They will find a way to battle. I don’t know how, other than to guess it will get ugly.”
Tech giants like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple have been ferociously recruiting top AI talent—and dishing out enormous pay packages to poach them. Top-tier AI researchers at Meta are reportedly being offered total compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with some first-year earnings over $100 million. One example was a former Apple executive Ruoming Pang, who Bloomberg reported is joining Meta’s “Superintelligence” team for $200 million.
In January, Microsoft announced it was investing about $80 billion this year alone on developing data centers to train AI models and deploy cloud-based applications. An AI researcher at Microsoft makes about $431,000, on average, according to Levels.fyi. Several job-posting sites show the average salary for a software engineer is roughly $125,000, so these so-called AI researchers are making more than three times a software engineer—a job that’s long been regarded as one of the most lucrative in tech.
Google has also invested about $75 billion in AI this year, and recently announced another $25 billion investment to build new AI data centers. Nvidia is also a clear frontrunner in hardware powering AI, and some research scientists there reportedly make more than $600,000.
“We are seeing them hire away talent and [intellectual property] to build [and] advance their models,” Cuban wrote. “But that’s just the beginning.”
Cuban predicts major tech companies will also start shelling out more to “lock up” the IP they think their models need to keep it from their competitors.
“The days of publish or perish are probably over,” Cuban wrote. “It’s now publish, and its value perishes, because it got eaten up by every foundational model.”
He suggests the companies that develop valuable IP for AI should encrypt it and silo it.
“IP is KING in an AI world,” Cuban added. “The times they are a changing.”
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Sydney Lake