Superstar coders are raking it in. Others, not so much

For a few AI whizzes, pay is going ballistic.

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Lucas Beyer is not a celebrity. But in Silicon Valley's rarefied world of machine-learning talent, he is seen as one.

A former researcher at OpenAI, Mr Beyer announced in June that he was leaving the artificial intelligence (AI) lab behind ChatGPT to join Meta, a social media giant with big AI ambitions of its own. With rumors swirling that Mr Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's boss, was offering packages worth US$100 million (S$127 million) to poach AI whizzes, Mr Beyer clarified that he had not secured a nine-figure deal. That he needed to say so at all reflects the extent of the frenzy.

Yet, the race for a handful of superstar software engineers masks a slump for everyone else.

As ChatGPT-like generative AI changes how code is written, companies are rethinking how many programmers they need.

In America, job postings for software developers have dropped by more than two-thirds since the beginning of 2022, according to data from Indeed, a recruitment site.

In January, Mr Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, a maker of business software, said his firm will not add any more software engineers in 2025, owing to productivity gains from AI tools.

In May, Microsoft, a tech colossus, cut around 6,000 jobs, many of them in engineering.