Generative AI hasn't been around long enough and even now is still prohibitively expensive (for training/research). It is highly suspect that any shortage of AI workers could be filled by importing them.
I find it much more likely that Google is merely whining. They're providing an excuse in the form of "not enough AI workers" for getting more cheap imported labor rather than simply hiring and training more expensive, local talent.
The field didn't just show up out of the blue. People around the world have been researching it for decades. A lot of them now want to come work in the US because this is where the money and opportunity is.
Take a look at the current AI landscape in the US. Almost everyone at the top of the field is a first generation immigrant, who managed to make it in while the process was still easy. It's wild that people see the clear benefits of their work to the economy and to US supremacy and then turn around and say that we need to stop importing talent because it takes away domestic jobs.
Where do you get the data to make the claim about the first generation immigrants. People like Sam Altman were born in Chicago. A great deal of AI research began in the US in the 1970s. What have the US colleges been doing since then?
Sam Altman does not have an AI background. OpenAI exists because of Ilya Sutskever. Anthropic's founders (Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei) are immigrants, as is Clément Delangue (HuggingFace), Aidan Gomez (Cohere) and upwards of 70% of new AI startups in the country. And Jensen Huang, Andrew Ng, Andrej Karpathy, Fei-Fei Li, Yann LeCun, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Shane Legg and pretty much the entire list of who's who in AI today. Demis Hassabis and a good chunk of his DeepMind team is British. Elon Musk himself would likely not have been able to clear the immigration process had he shown up to the country today. Despite what people here like to believe, the USA doesn't have a monopoly on talent. It has always relied on immigration to maintain supremacy.
As for the "what have US colleges been doing" question – take a look at the nationalities of research departments at any major university in the country. The smartest people come here from all over the world to study, and are now promptly sent home with all the knowledge they gained because we don't let them put that knowledge to work here.
Why doesn't Google fund or open a school that trains talent? Why is it always "please let in more foreigners who are already trained"? Corps like Google with their attitude are just contributing to brain drain and helping to make those other countries poorer as a result.
Oh right, brain drain is a foreign policy strategy to keep other countries down and America strong. Right, shutting up now.
Didn't they just layoff a number of people? Surely there are some good, local talent that were once good enough for Google. Why ask to import more when you're laying off people?
I've seen this line about "cheap imported labor" all the time and frankly when it comes to software I don't understand it. The pay in this field is outrageously high. I don't think immigration policy should be concerned with protecting my salary. It should be concerned with increasing the country's power to the maximum extent possible.
Is the hypothetical immigrant not also part of the labor class? What about their massively increased surplus through immigration? Restricted immigration doesn't help the "labor class" at all except only as defined through a narrow nationalist lens.
Narrow nationalist lens? I'm an American laborer, of course I care more about what happens to American laborers than what happens to laborers from other places... they're my neighbors and countrymen?
If someone immigrates here they will by definition become your fellow countryman (and possibly your neighbor too, depending on where they end up). I guess we just fundamentally disagree on who's worth consideration in this equation. I want to see people succeed no matter where they come from.
We have a greater interest in preventing instability here by ensuring that those already here can find stable employment that provides a good wage and stability. I care about the success of my countrymen more than I do random people from wherever.
I want people to succeed - in their home countries. That's fine, let them do that. I'm also a fan of legal immigration - you come here by the book, throw on the jersey, you're on the team. That's fine too. If you don't do that though, I'm not only not a fan but those people shouldn't be here.
Don’t junior ai people notoriously have a really hard time getting hired? If big tech wants ai talent, they should stop starving new people who want to get into the field
It's pretty clear that "the most highly sought-after people in the world" in AI aren't fresh college grads or junior engineers.
If someone with a PhD and decades worth of research and practical experience in cutting-edge ML/AI/semiconductor tech wants to immigrate to the US, it's idiotic to put them in the same lottery as a $50K/yr "IT consultant" from Infosys. This is exactly why the US completely lost its edge in hi-tech manufacturing and is now losing ground in software/apps as well.
You want your junior engineers to have jobs and gain skills? Maybe don't say no to the best talent from across the world who can mentor them.
It's strategic. China has amazing AI talent being developed. US is still generally a more desirable place to live. If that talent comes here, we'll maintain world leadership. If that talent stays in China, US competitiveness can completely implode.
But yes, junior talent has relatively little value in a winner-takes-all field, while top talent, disproportionately large value.
What? I'm no expert but in basically every field and endeavor, it seems to me like all the PRC does is copy others, but have little to no legitimate homegrown innovation, and lots of "research" being basically fake and fluff.
+ even if PRC was the global hub for AI innovation, for obvious reasons, I'm not sure it would be wise for the US to import that talent.
About half of the best AI researchers I know are Chinese. I've visited universities there, and the quality of education is very high. There are a few barriers:
1) Language. Much of the stuff (including e.g. variable names and comments in code) are Chinese.
2) Communication style. Even in English, things are just organized differently.
3) Culture and national differences. The issues you mentioned are real; academic publishing in China is even more problematic than in the US. (We have our own issues, which are at least as severe; just different. Every place has issues).
4) Looking in US-style sources in China, and vice-versa, isn't likely to lead to optimal outcomes.
Those and others means things are often lost in translation, but at the core, once you learn to bridge those, the quality of the better work there is very, very good.
Try reading the author list of AI papers. Even those from western universities and labs. If you can't spot a pattern, then there's Sum Tin Wong with you.
no -- the formal research literature in competitive settings are filled with part or whole PRC teams.. written in science English and often very thorough.. are those papers all advances? no, many are tiny variations on known methods, use the boiler-plate bragging language about State of the Art performance, and often cite mostly other Chinese authors as sources.. but honestly, the effort and erudition are, on the whole, impressive and competitive.
I would add that when it comes time to productize the research the code quality of open source AI tools for this from China is conspicuously high. In the west this part gets ignored too much.
Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant on a restrictive visa, so obvious conflict of interest.
The harshness of the US immigration system has little to do with how easy/hard it is to let people in. The issues arise with how restrictive the visas are, once you get in.
> He adds Google employees have often had to leave the US while waiting for the PERM process to finish and for their green cards to be approved.
This is clearly meant to point toward Indians and Chinese. Waiting 50+ years for a green card betrays the intentions of the legislation and creates uncecessary misery for everyone involved.
Bringing top AI talent to the US is easy. Do a masters, pay the $100k entry-fee to the university and get your 3 year permission to work in the US. But that's where the process becomes an anxiety inducing mess. First you have to win a 'lottery' with a 30% success rate. Then, you have to go through a 2-ish year long process through mountains of paper work to do your Green Card application. Then wait one more year to get an acknolwedgement (I-140), which puts you in a 50+ year long queue.
Now, if you want to make a minor change in job role, location, company, start a startup....doesn't matter. Do this expensive process all over again. Oh yeah, did I mention that the embassy stamping officer, the airport agent, the application form evaluator and your employer can arbitrarily drop you any day ? Now, that's fine if I'm 25 and single. But, one day I'll be 40 with kids, still on this stupid H1b/Greencard-queue and my life can get uprooted overnight.
It is the an all-too-literal instance of golden handcuffs.
If you want immigrants, then let in immigrants. If you want fewer immigrants, then then let in fewer immigrants. If you want better immigrants, then raise the bar. If you want temporary workers, then make it impossible for H1b folks to apply to greencards. All are sensible approaches. But the US system lures you in with the promise of a better life, and uniquely screws you over if you just so happen to be Indian.
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All that being said, the tech market clearly has too many unemployed citizens as of 2024. I am suspicious of more immigration being the answer. I know people from top-10 CS universities graduating with no jobs. If Google is so desperate, then lower your bar to 2020-era levels, and train up these junior engineers to your required level of competence. If Google wants true experts, then the O1 already exists.
I'm lucky enough to be considered 'senior' (whatever that means in tech) technical person now. And I thank my lucky stars for it. This is the most brutal 'junior' market that I have seen since the early-2010s.
Restrictive immigration exists solely to suppress wages for citizens/residents, legal temporary workers and undocumented migrants. I really wish more people understood this.
> All that being said, the tech market clearly has too many unemployed citizens as of 2024.
Big Tech is now in a permanent layoffs mode. This too is solely to suppress wages and, as you mention, this is a huge issue for people who are on work visas.
I personally think that anyone who has done layoffs in the last 12 months shouldn't be eligible to sponsor any work visas at all.
If Google can't import the talent they need into the US, they have the option of just sending the work to an office in India, at least, as they did in the last layoffs. If we freeze up immigration here in the USA, Google and all the other big techs have an easy way out. The bigger issue is that if you want to collect top talent from all over the world, you might not be able to do that in India yet, but maybe you still can do it in Zurich or Munich.
The US is kind of caught in a bind here: they want companies to continue doing R&D here, and that means being competitive with respect to immigration. But at the same time, they want to encourage employment of existing residents/citizens, without being so restrictive that those jobs just move to other countries anyways.
Aren't there already tens of thousands of bonafide geniuses in India, working for a foreign tech company, earning mid six figures because it's a lot cheaper then paying seven figures in the US?
I worked for Microsoft in Beijing and was underpaid vs my colleagues in Beijing. But I still pulled away more than $100k/year. I could make those poverty wages work with the lower cost of living in Beijing vs Redmond.
I would bet Google in India is similar, but I have no information on compensation there so couldn’t tell for sure.
Peter Roberts (Immigration Attorney for YC/Startups) does AMAs on Hacker News every couple of months, they attract a lot of questions, answers, and general comments:
Isn’t this going to simply result in companies and immigrants claiming that their job or skill set is “AI” in order to game the immigration system? How can this be made legitimately focused on scarce talent and not just turned into a method to increase labor supply and reduce costs.
I imagine this would result in a large number of people catering their job applications and interview preparedness to AI topics but otherwise not having any particularly special or more advanced AI related skills (unless this is about targeting a handful of demonstrated experts).
Yes, this is the super obvious fix that doesn't involve the US Government changing any rules/laws. Google has offices all over the world, they really don't even need to be remote.
EB-5 is investment only and not related to skills, isn't it? So the applicant themselves would need to have significant savings to plough back into the US economy to qualify for this visa? They aren't tied to a company but do need significant capital.
According to the Law of Supply and Demand if there is a low supply of AI talent and a high demand from Google, then Google is supposed to compete for that talent, e.g. raise wages, offer more benefits, more sick time, etc. As the article states:
> Competition for AI talent has been intense, with companies often poaching engineers and researchers.
> Wages for AI specialists soared, with OpenAI allegedly paying researchers up to $10 million.
This is not a bug, this is the expected behavior. Artificially raising the supply of AI talent through immigration is market manipulation.
I find it much more likely that Google is merely whining. They're providing an excuse in the form of "not enough AI workers" for getting more cheap imported labor rather than simply hiring and training more expensive, local talent.