^{This article originally appeared on Business Insider.}

Recruiting AI talent can be a difficult feat for some companies.

Aravind Srinivas, founder and CEO of inattentionan AI-powered question-and-answer engine described its interaction with a job candidate that shows how difficult it can be to hire people with generative AI skills.

“I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta, and you know what they said? 'Get back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs,'” Srinivas said on a recent episode of the business advice podcast “.Invest like the best.”

H100 GPUs refer to Nvidia's highly coveted graphics processing units that tech giants love MetaOpenAI and Google use in their data centers to power and train their AI chatbots.

“That would cost billions and take five to 10 years to get by Nvidia,” Srinivas said.

Limited funding, combined with a chip shortage, means that Perplexity, which powers its Q&A engine using GPT-4, has struggled to find the talent required to create a large scale model. linguistic, Srinivas said.

Srinivas said it's hard to get employees to leave a company where they “have a large set of experiments and existing models to draw on.”

“You have to offer such amazing incentives and instant availability of computing. And we're not talking about small computing clusters here,” he said.

The CEO added that even if smaller firms like Perplexity are able to get Nvidia's chips, they will continue to lag behind because AI is developing so quickly.

Srinivas said AI talent at big tech companies “will have already made the next generation model”.

“They say: 'Look, the world has changed, I'm already in the next generation,'” he added. “'I'll come when the next version of the model finishes training. This time, you'll come back to me when you have 20,000 H100'.”

Srinivas and Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider ahead of publication.

There has been a rapid increase in interest in AI capabilities such as machine learning and data engineering since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. Companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Meta have offered salaries as high as $900,000 a year to attract AI generating talent, and non-tech companies Across the education, healthcare and legal sectors, they have sought to fill roles with workers who know how to use AI.

Srinivas believes that workers need skills beyond the ability to create AI models that generate desirable results.

“You have to train them back and address the long tail of issues you get in servicing a product,” the CEO said.

Post-training expertise, like knowing how to reduce a chatbot's factual inaccuracies, is an important skill that employees from a wide range of digital industries can learn quickly, Srinivas said.

Drawing on that skill set, he said, will help AI companies like Perplexity stand out in a sector dominated by Big Tech.

“You have a tremendous advantage to create a lot of value,” he said of the skills after the training. “And we're focused on that.”