AI hiring
AI is rewriting the tech jobs map — OpenAI lands in Singapore, Anthropic poaches Karpathy, AI postings up 117% YoY
OpenAI is opening its first overseas applied-AI lab in Singapore (~200 roles, $235M committed), Anthropic just hired Andrej Karpathy into its pretraining team, and AI-related job postings in the US are up 117% year-to-date. The hiring story has split: 'no-hire, no-fire' for generalists, frantic competition for AI talent.
Two stories landed this week that capture how bifurcated the tech market has become.
On one end, OpenAI announced its first applied-AI lab outside the United States — a S$300M (~$235M) multi-year commitment in Singapore, with a ramp to roughly 200 staff in Forward Deployed Engineering and applied-research roles. The lab will align with Singapore's public-sector, finance, healthcare and digital-infrastructure mandates. Google DeepMind signed a parallel partnership at the same ATxSG summit, making clear that the city-state is deliberately locking in concurrent footholds with both frontier labs.
On the other end, Anthropic continued its talent raid — Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI founding member and former head of Tesla Autopilot, joined Anthropic's pretraining team on May 19, reporting to head of pretraining Nick Joseph. He will build 'a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself.' Karpathy follows Jan Leike (ex-superalignment co-lead) and a string of senior OpenAI and xAI departures into Anthropic over the past year.
Underneath the headlines, the broader US market is what CompTIA and Experis are calling 'no-hire, no-fire': tech unemployment is steady around 4.2%, but tech-related sector hiring fell in April (telecom −2.5%, infra providers −3.9%). What is growing — and growing fast — is AI-specific demand:
- AI-related job postings are up 117% year-to-date year-over-year (CompTIA / Lightcast). - Database architect postings up ~2x YoY; data scientist postings up 280% YoY as companies push from AI experiments into production. - AI skill mentions in postings dipped 10% in May but remain up 10% for the year, suggesting steady (not bubble-driven) demand.
What this means for candidates: the talent market is no longer one market. If your skill stack is 'AI-adjacent' (data engineering, ML infra, RAG and agent plumbing, evals, applied-AI for a specific vertical), competition is intense — Singapore, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and the Bay Area are all bidding for the same shortlist. If your stack is generalist web/app dev with no AI leverage story, you are competing in a buyer's market with rising specificity in JDs.
Source: Computerworld · CompTIA · TheNextWeb · Observer
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