Money no longer matters to AI's top talent

Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing, increasingly, is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It to Me, how to mind your manners.

New episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil A 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.

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