Over 125 current & former employees of frontier AI companies have called on @CAGovernor to #SignSB1047.
I know this is a political statement that isn’t optimizing for such things, but, I am pretty interested in knowing “what actually is the denominator of people who meaningfully count as ’employees of frontier AI companies?”. If the answer is 10s of thousands then, well, that is indeed a tiny number. But I think the number might be something more like 1000-3000?
If you include Facebook & Google (i.e. the entire orgs) as “frontier AI companies”, then 6-figures. If you only include Deepmind and FAIR (and OpenAI and Anthropic), maybe order of 10-15k, though who knows what turnover’s been like. Rough current headcount estimates:
Deepmind: 2600 (as of May 2024, includes post-Brain-merge employees)
Meta AI (formerly FAIR): ~1200 (unreliablesources; seems plausible, but is probably an implicit undercount since they almost certainly rely a lot of various internal infrastructure used by all of Facebook’s engineering departments that they’d otherwise need to build/manage themselves.)
I know this is a political statement that isn’t optimizing for such things, but, I am pretty interested in knowing “what actually is the denominator of people who meaningfully count as ’employees of frontier AI companies?”. If the answer is 10s of thousands then, well, that is indeed a tiny number. But I think the number might be something more like 1000-3000?
If you include Facebook & Google (i.e. the entire orgs) as “frontier AI companies”, then 6-figures. If you only include Deepmind and FAIR (and OpenAI and Anthropic), maybe order of 10-15k, though who knows what turnover’s been like. Rough current headcount estimates:
Deepmind: 2600 (as of May 2024, includes post-Brain-merge employees)
Meta AI (formerly FAIR): ~1200 (unreliable sources; seems plausible, but is probably an implicit undercount since they almost certainly rely a lot of various internal infrastructure used by all of Facebook’s engineering departments that they’d otherwise need to build/manage themselves.)
OpenAI: >1700
Anthropic: >500 (as of May 2024)
So that’s a floor of ~6k current employees.