Following Big Tech's footsteps in the AI race, Netflix is mulling a leap into the sector. Netflix is reportedly willing to pay up to $1 million in cash for anyone willing to lead a team to create AI foundational models.
The news came into focus via an X (formerly Twitter) handle by the Deedy, who shared a screenshot of what appears to be a job posting on LinkedIn for an engineering manager for developing foundational models.
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
The news of Netflix building its AI model comes at a time when the AI race is heating up, with Chinese AI models providing stiff competition to their Western counterparts, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
The latest major flashpoint in this battle came when DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT in the free app rankings on the Google Play Store and Apple's App Store. DeepSeek claims its AI models are built at a fraction of the cost of the leading models from OpenAI and its competitors, while being trained on older Nvidia chips. DeepSeek's low-cost, open-source models have put pressure on American companies to build better models and make them available at a lower cost.
OpenAI has responded to the growing pressure with the launch of its o3-Mini reasoning model and an agentic tool called Deep Research. A similar response is expected from Anthropic, Google, and top AI players.
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