Netflix joins tech giants in AI rat race, seeks top talent with $1 million offer

Following the lead of Big Tech in the AI race, Netflix is also now said to be looking at taking the leap in this sector. Netflix is reportedly willing to pay up to $1 million cash for anyone willing to lead a team for making AI foundational models. 

The news came to light with an X (formerly Twitter) handle by the Deedy, sharing a screenshot of what seems like a job posting on LinkedIn for Engineering manager for foundational models development. 

Netflix CEO on AI replacing humans: 

Notably, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos in an interview with the New York Times last year had denied the possibility of AI supplanting creators. He said, “I have more faith in humans than that. I really do,”

“I don’t believe that an A.I. program is going to write a better screenplay than a great writer, or is going to replace a great performance, or that we won’t be able to tell the difference. A.I. is not going to take your job,” Sarandos added

AI race heating up: 

The news of Netflix building its AI model comes at a time when the AI race is heating up with Chiense AI models giving tough competition to their western counterparts incluidng OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Gemini and more. 

The last major flashpoint in this battle came with DeepSeek taking over ChatGPT in the free app rankings on Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. DeepSeek claims that its AI models are built at a fraction of the cost compared to the leading models from OpenAI and its peers while being trained on older Nvidia chips. The cost-efficient open-source models from DeepSeek have put pressure on American companies to build better models and provide them at cheaper cost.

OpenAI has responded to the increasing pressure with the rollout of its o3-Mini reasoning model and an agentic tool called Deep Research. A similar sort of response is also expected from Anthropic, Google and the rest.