The AI Industry Is Becoming Like Professional Sports
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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Jill Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Allow White.
Tracy, I love doing the podcast, but I'm kind of thinking about becoming a PhD level A AI researcher. If I do a career pivot, it seems something I'm considering. Have you seen have you seen like the salaries supposedly I still don't actually believe them, but have you seen like the salaries and comp packages that supposedly Meta and a few others are paying for top AI talent? I have seen
some of the headlines. I have also learned a bunch of new words like exploding offer and aqua hire. Oh, yeah. And I always thought exploding offer sounds dangerous. What you want is an explosive offer that you can't turn down.
Yeah.
So you have to make a decision right away. And the company that you're currently working for can't counter offer.
So I read these headlines about some engineer or something getting paid a hundred million or two hundred fifty million. I actually literally don't believe them. Like I actually literally think that's fake news.
Really? No, but I couldn't just think it's probably made up of like all this weird equity structure.
But I'm sure it's not all up front. Anyway, we sort of seem to be in a moment. And it's actually not just AI, I would say uh journalism, finance, et cetera, where it's like the sportsification of a lot of different industries. Individual talent, the demand for individual superstars on anything, doing very well.
I have a bunch of questions when it comes specifically to AI, such as what makes an AI talent? Because I assume if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're trying to assemble your AI dream team or something, okay, sure. You have like a level of technical insight and maybe you hear people talking about, oh, this one guy is fantastic. But I assume it's not like you can look at their like individual levels of code and you can't see what they're doing on like a daily basis. I don't know.
I don't know either. I don't know anything about this stuff. But I'm really excited to say we do have the perfect guests, a couple of guys who are right in the middle of all of this, and also who have sort of been ahead of the curve in terms of this, like I said, the sportsification of the industry. We're going to be speaking with uh John Coogan and Jordy Hayes. They are the co-hosts of TBPN. It's a live show podcast. It's become one of my favorite news. New media properties, it exists, and I'm really excited. We have them both in the studio here with us today. So, John and Jordy, thank you so much for uh coming on Autbots. Thanks for having us. We're so excited to be here. I love by the way you guys like make these like baseball cards every time.
So it's so clever. It's so clever. For those who are not paying attention, why don't you sort of give the high-level overview of like what you see happening in this like crazy talent war? For people who don't know. What is actually going on? for people who know how to do AI or train a model or whatever it is.
Yeah, the league or the Mag Seven, the serious teams are all worth over a trillion dollars. Tesla's in a different kind of boat some days, but pretty much there's multi there's seven trillion plus dollar companies now. So there is an inordinate amount of money to flow around. And if you think about investing point one percent of your market cap to make your business potentially five percent better, that's a trade you take all day. The number is staggering, but now you're seeing companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars. I think you mentioned that you know there's a lot of debate over whether that was fake news or not.
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4 chaptersSpeakers
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