The Two Thousand

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My son is about to start his final year of high school in a week.

He’s tall.

He loves basketball.

He’s into a lot of different music.

And he’s very good at math.

We’ve been discussing what he plans to do when he heads off to post-secondary school.

He thinks he might want to train to be a pilot (I blame Tom Cruise and Top Gun: Maverick for that).

Or perhaps become an engineer, like some of his friends (but not the easy type of engineer, like his uncle Rob).

There’s also talk of kenisology.

Like a lot of teenagers, he’s a perfect mix of arrogance, laundry smells, and confusion, which is precisely what he should be.

I floated the idea recently that he should consider becoming an AI researcher (it sounded boring when I said it out loud).

I told him that there are only about two thousand top-tier AI researchers worldwide and that they are now commanding salaries akin to NBA stars.

The dollar signs piqued his interest.

But he still said no (for now).

He doesn’t like the idea of being trapped behind a screen at a desk (like his old man).

News coverage of artificial intelligence suggests that our future is forged in racks of Nvidia GPUs (even if their recent earnings revealed an overdependence on sales to a surprisingly short list of companies), hyperscale data centers, and compute capacity that could outstrip the electricity needs of entire nations.

Companies have earmarked billions in the AI buildout and whisper Moore’s Law like it’s a bedtime story.

But the real AI arms race isn’t over silicon, it’s over people.

When you’re looking for folks with a PhD in an AI-related field, experience at a top lab, and contributions to AI research breakthroughs, the list of people you might include is exceedingly small.

There might be approximately 1.5 million people working directly in AI globally.

However, there are only a couple of thousand individuals who could redefine the space with a breakthrough model.

And big tech is willing to pay almost anything to hire them.

Companies are reportedly offering compensation packages in the tens of millions for single hires, along with signing bonuses that resemble exit packages.

One top researcher can command more than an entire mid-tier engineering team.

And the likes of Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, et cetera, don’t even blink, because in their math, the cost of losing ground in AI dwarfs the cost of overpaying a genius.

Mark Zuckerberg had his team at Meta compile a list of top AI engineers, aiming to recruit them to Meta with lucrative offers.

He reached out to many of them personally (I bet that’s a weird call to get).

Meta has reportedly poached as many as 10 of OpenAI’s top researchers and model developers, with some pay packages reportedly adding up to $300 million over four years.

Microsoft has poached more than 20 Google DeepMind AI engineers.

Google is opting to acquire its way to AI advancement while also maneuvering to avoid antitrust scrutiny by leveraging investment and licensing deals (a lot is going on at Google on the legal front).

However, it turns out that even if you’re paid millions of dollars, you still might not want to work at Meta.

As quickly as it started, Mark is putting a pin in Meta’s hiring bonanza.

But the AI researcher recruitment war is likely far from over.

These companies aren’t hiring employees; they’re assembling Avengers-esque AI super teams.

Except instead of saving the world, they’re mostly making better autocomplete and accelerating our ability to animate our favourite cat memes into cat videos.

So when the hype cycle runs out, remember this: the most critical component in AI isn’t a chip on a motherboard.

It’s a fragile, fallible, frequently over-caffeinated person.

Thankfully, AI is still human-powered.

For now.

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