LONDON, March 11 Reuters An influx of artificial intelligence AI startups is heating up the battle for technical talent in Europe, leaving companies like Google DeepMind to choose between paying big or losing out on the region39;s best minds.

The runaway success of OpenAI39;s ChatGPT has energised investors, who have been pouring money into promising AI startups, eager to uncover the next overnight success.

Riding the investment wave, a crop of foreign AI firms including Canada39;s Cohere and U.S.based Anthropic and OpenAI opened offices in Europe last year, adding to pressure on tech companies already trying to attract and retain talent in the region.

Founded in 2010 and acquired by Google in 2014, Londonbased DeepMind made its name applying AI to everything from board games to structural biology.

Now the firm faces a host of wellfunded rivals flooding its territory, while a growing number of its employees have quit to launch their own ventures.

Recent highprofile exits include cofounder Mustafa Suleyman, who left to set up Californiabased Inflection AI alongside LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, and research scientist Arthur Mensch, now CEO of Mistral AI. Both companies have received multibillion dollar valuations in the short time they have been active.

In an apparent effort to discourage staff from joining other companies or starting their own, DeepMind gave a handful of senior researchers access to restricted stock, worth millions of dollars, earlier this…