Sundar Pichai, main enforcement serviceman of Alphabet Inc., during the Bloomberg Tech league successful San Francisco, California, US, connected Wednesday, June 4, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With the AI endowment wars heating up betwixt companies similar OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic, 1 mode Google has been competing is by aggressively rehiring erstwhile employees.
Some 20% of bundle engineers moving connected artificial quality that Google hired successful 2025 were alleged boomerang employees, an summation from anterior years, CNBC has learned. A Google spokesperson confirmed the statistic remains close arsenic of December, and said the institution saw a leap successful the fig of AI researchers coming from large competitors compared to 2024.
John Casey, Google's caput of compensation, precocious told employees successful a gathering astir the rehiring. Casey said AI-focused bundle engineers are drawn to Google's heavy pockets and hefty computational infrastructure that's needed to execute precocious AI work, according to audio reviewed by CNBC.
Google has a ample excavation of ex-employees to mine, peculiarly aft its largest ever circular of layoffs successful aboriginal 2023, erstwhile genitor institution Alphabet chopped 12,000 jobs, reducing headcount by 6%. That followed a marketplace downturn driven by soaring ostentation and rising involvement rates. Google has since continued with rolling layoffs and buyouts.
Across the industry, worker boomerangs are up, according to data published earlier this twelvemonth by ADP Research, with the assemblage it classifies arsenic accusation showing the starkest numbers.
Google has been racing to drawback up successful generative AI aft a dilatory commencement that followed OpenAI's merchandise of ChatGPT successful precocious 2022. After fumbling a fig of merchandise rollouts, the institution has bounced back this year, acknowledgment to hefty investments successful AI infrastructure and the occurrence of its Gemini app. Google announced its latest model, Gemini 3, past month.
Alphabet's banal terms is up much than 60% this year, outperforming each of its megacap peers.
As a humanities hotbed of engineering and innovation, Google has agelong been a spot wherever competitors person turned to effort and poach talent. That's inactive the case.
Earlier this year, Microsoft hired astir 2 twelve employees from Google's DeepMind AI probe lab, CNBC reported successful July. OpenAI, meanwhile, has opened its wallets wide, on with Meta. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees successful June that Meta had been offering $100 cardinal signing bonuses, and that helium was aggressively trying to clasp staffers.
Late past year, Google brought backmost a large fig successful AI: Noam Shazeer.
Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas near Google successful 2021 to commencement AI level Character.AI, reportedly departing aft Google rebuffed their attempts to effort and get the institution to propulsion its interior chatbot forward.
Along with different members of the Character.AI probe team, Shazeer and De Freitas rejoined DeepMind successful August 2024 nether a licensing woody for the startup's technology.
Over the past year, Google has taken much risks, shipping products more quickly, adjacent if they aren't viewed arsenic wholly ready. Google has besides made a companywide effort to remove bureaucracy, enacting wide worker buyouts and eliminating much than one-third of its managers overseeing tiny teams, CNBC reported successful August.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who came retired of status successful 2023, has astatine times personally reached retired to prospective candidates to enlistee them, according to radical acquainted with the substance who asked not to beryllium named due to the fact that they weren't authorized to talk to the media. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has besides reportedly reached retired to researchers connected behalf of his company.
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