The big hirers of machine learning talent in 2024 are very different to 2019
If you want a machine learning job right now, there are a few companies with money to spend. And they are no longer just the big technology firms.
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Attendees of this week's 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, held in Vienna, tell us they were struck by the parsimony of big technology firms compared to the recent past. By comparison, the corporate visitors with big money to spend were mostly quantitative trading firms.
Five years ago, the "Diamond sponsors" of the ICML were Facebook and doc.ai, only one of which still seems to exist. To the extent that financial services firms were sponsoring the event in 2019, they were among the small spenders. JPMorgan was a gold sponsor. Credit Suisse was a bronze.
Times have changed. This year, the roster of diamond sponsors at ICML reads like a who's who of electronic trading firms. Microsoft and Google Research are in the highest spending category alongside Jane Street, Citadel and Citadel Securities, Jump Trading, Equilent, and DE Shaw.
HSBC is (surprisingly perhaps) a platinum sponsor this year. XTX is gold.
While money spent sponsoring machine learning conferences isn't exactly correlated to money spent hiring machine learning talent, a big conference presence has long been a cheap way of making yourself known to potential recruits.
Curiously, none of the topics under discussion at the conference seem to involve the application of machine learning to financial services issues. This might simply because none of the firms spending money to be diamond sponsors want to disclose what they're doing to all their competitors.
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