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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 last month 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 rumours swirling that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss, was offering packages worth $100m 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 Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, a maker of business software, said his firm will not add any more software engineers this year, owing...