Nilay Patel

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Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today, we're going to talk about the war for AI talent.

Right now, the hottest job market on the planet is for AI researchers, and the vast majority of these people are concentrated into a small number of hugely valuable, extremely fast-growing companies in the San Francisco Bay areas.

And these companies are paying some of the highest salaries in the history of the tech industry to poach researchers from one another.

And it feels like every time one of these AI researchers leaves one company for another, they tell us exactly why.

Sometimes they're simply resigning to go be a poet.

Sometimes they're chasing a mission.