Inside the China-US Competition for AI Experts
Who’s winning the fight for top-tier AI talent?
A statue of an artificial intelligence (AI) robot during the Baidu Inc. Create conference in Shenzhen, China.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/BloombergAI is all the rage right now. There are billions of dollars now flowing into the space, with large and small companies all competing to create the next big thing. But in addition to lots of money, building new AI models requires top-tier researchers. So, who's attracting the best? And what does it take to be considered top talent in AI anyway? On this episode we speak with Damien Ma, managing director at MacroPolo, the in-house think tank of the Paulson Institute. Damien helps put together MacroPolo's Global AI Talent Tracker, which monitors the flow of top-tier AI researchers around the world. We discuss who's winning the AI talent war so far, the purported talent drain in China, competition from India, and much more. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Key Insights from the pod:
Tracking AI Talent — 4:28
The top 20% vs the top 2% of AI Talent — 6:48
What makes a really good AI engineer — 7:21
Where are AI Talent coming from and where are they going? — 8:49
US.AI Talent and Immigration — 12:15
Chinese domestic AI talent — 14:20
How tight is AI talent labor market? — 16:42
Broadening AI graduate programs in China — 18:36
Chinese Internet Companies and AI — 20:08
Will AI ramp up US-China competition? — 22:27
Domestic Chinese rhetoric around the talent war? — 24:18
Have US universities increased AI research capacity? — 27:04
Will AI technical skills be automated in the near future? — 28:29
Is computing power a recruiting tactic for AI companies? — 30:47