Madhumita Murgia

It's people, it's talent, which is a huge, huge commodity.

And sort of, you know, there's only a limited pool of people who really are the best in the world at building AI and deploying it.

And yes, we're going to train up more.

But these companies, they're fighting over this limited pool of people.

You can see that from the sort of salaries that they command.

And a lot of these researchers, they are scientists.

Many come from physics or chemistry, and they are driven by something more than a commercial imperative just to get rich.

I mean, we do know from the case this week that people like Greg Brockman might feel differently and are maybe driven by how can I get to my billion dollars.

Yeah, in court in the case of Elon Musk versus OpenAI.

And he had been musing about how he could hit a billion dollars.

But I think like in contrast, many of the researchers who are sort of key to building AI are here because they want to invent something amazing that has a positive beneficial impact on society that...

solves huge unsolvable problems.

And having spoken to some of them this past week, there is this real sense of disillusionment.

And it's funny because like when you look at it from the outside as a journalist following it, you wonder why didn't they know this already?

You can see how AI has been accelerating in terms of its rollout and how it's being used in military and other contexts.

So why now?

But one person I spoke to said, you know, for the first time they could see directly how something that they contributed to building could result in real loss of innocent lives.

And there was nothing they could do to stop it.

And the way this person described it is there's a feeling, a widespread feeling amongst this talent of just helplessness and lack of agency to the point where people are just quitting and saying, what is the point of anything really?

Right.