Sundar Pichai Breaks Silence On Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg-Led Meta Poaching Google DeepMind Talents

In 2024, Google DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman joined Microsoft. He left the company in 2022, leaving it at the helm of Nobel laureate cofounder Demis Hassabis. The AI talent war intensified with more of the firm’s employees poached by Microsoft in July. Around 24 techies from Alphabet left for the Satya Nadella-led company, including Amar Subramanya, a former VP of engineering at Google who worked on the Gemini AI assistant. In June a senior director from DeepMind, Adam Sadovsky, left for Microsoft to become a corporate VP at the company. A couple others including Sonal Gupta and Jonas Rothfuss, joined Microsoft per their LinkedIn announcements.

This came in the wake of ruthless poaching by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for his Superintelligence Team, which scooped up several OpenAI talents, including a few from Google DeepMind. Allegedly Meta offered $100 million to techies, which was dismissed by Zuckerberg as rumors.

Is Sundar Pichai worried at all? During the Q2 earning calls, the Alphabet and Google CEO quipped,

I do know individual cases can make headlines. But when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing well through the moment.”

He stated,

We continue to look at both our retention metrics as well as the new talent coming in, and both are healthy.”

‘Individual cases make headline, but…’ says Google CEO Sundar Pichai on employee poaching by major rival https://t.co/lymXvxrw2D
— Financial Express (@FinancialXpress) September 17, 2025

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