Amazon’s AI division is a revolving door of talent for Microsoft and Google

A recently released report shows that Amazon, over the last five years, has been involved in an AI-developer ménage à trois with Google and Microsoft. It turns out all three companies have a penchant for poaching talent in the machine-learning field from each other on a regular basis.

Last month Amazon was looking everywhere to fill its open AI positions, and today there are 140 job openings on its AI hiring site alone. According to career site Paysa, this is par for the course for Amazon, who has been trying to grab as much AI talent as it can while simultaneously losing about the same number of employees to the companies it’s poaching from.

Microsoft, especially, seems deadlocked in employee-swapping limbo. The Redmond company lost 123 AI devs to Amazon while gaining 124. This is the next level of foreign exchange student programs.

Google, by far, has been the biggest recipient of talent from the online superstore though, with 132 devs joining the Alphabet inc. company and only 13 leaving Sundar Pichai for Jeff Bezos.

It looks like AI devs are the new rock stars and, as long as you’re on-board with the impending robot takeover, that’s a good thing. There was a time when it seemed like there were 10 job openings for every web developer and the outlook for machine-learning programmers is the same now.

AI programmers looking for a job at Google or Microsoft should start by getting hired at Amazon.