Systems engineer Yacine argues tech companies should stop hiring from NeurIPS and CVPR and recruit from SIGGRAPH instead
Story Overview
Systems engineer Yacine is urging tech companies to redirect hiring efforts away from the machine learning heavy conferences NeurIPS and CVPR and toward SIGGRAPH instead, where graphics and systems expertise often cluster, especially for roles involving robotics and complex simulation work.
Early AI labs already mixed in game talent
Heinrich Kuttler replied that DeepMind's original team included many professionals from gaming backgrounds, underscoring a historical connection between game engine skills and foundational AI research.
Practical payoff of the suggested shift stays unknown
No hiring metrics, performance comparisons, or outcome details appear in the exchange, leaving the potential advantages of prioritizing SIGGRAPH candidates as an open question for teams weighing recruitment changes.
Many users endorsed recruiting game engine engineers over pure language-model specialists because those skills deliver powerful creative and 3D capabilities, while others objected out of fear it would intensify hiring competition.
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you big hot shot AI guys really need to start cannibalizing the game engine people. they're making like 70 grand working on things much more difficult than language models
@yacineMTB og deepmind had many gaming people.
you big hot shot AI guys really need to start cannibalizing the game engine people. they're making like 70 grand working on things much more difficult than language models
@marcospereeira @yacineMTB That’s not necessarily true
Python is good but pygames lpgl license is the mood killer
Cave engine runs on python I think python more fun than c++
Lua is good too
@yacineMTB threejs but for native would be nice
use vulkan/opengl/metal instead of webgpu
@vibrolax @yacineMTB Fair enough, but you could argue the same thing about most startups that what they're working on isn't life or death and demand is high - yet those devs get paid double. Could just be an economics issue too with how much games make🤷♂️
@yacineMTB Game engines are so cool, man. Definitely check out Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom.
@yacineMTB Difficult games at scale are what's separating the frontier from the guys distilling the frontier.
That's what we're doing at http://gertlabs.com/rankings
@marcospereeira I'm doing ML in nothing but c and CUDA
@yacineMTB game engine guys is literally doing the same linear algebra as big hot shot AI guys
@yacineMTB Gaming industry is dying because Gen Z attention span is shit
@yacineMTB I never understood why game developers make so little. They solve some of the hardest technical problems in the world. It's like a humiliation ritual the industry imposes to be able to work on something you love. Just pushes great talent out of the space. Never made sense to me.
@marcospereeira @yacineMTB thats precisely why the AI world needs them
@jcrichman @yacineMTB And everybody eats eggs when no one pays for chefs.
@yacineMTB shut up shut up shut up!! i don't want more competition in this hiring pool omg
@yacineMTB for the love of the game no less
@yacineMTB game engine guys wouldn't touch python with a 10ft pole
@yacineMTB Game engine and graphics programmers are some of the most amazing people I’ve worked with. Creative, used to working on resource constrained hardware and able to make the hardware do things the designers didn’t think was possible. AI companies should be aggressively recruiting
@yacineMTB Those guys hate AI, because they love doing this hard programming and it's going to go away. I guess, I am an exception.
@yacineMTB Right because what the gaming industry needs is more slop.
@yacineMTB most AI breakthroughs are built on the backs of DOOM devs iykyk