The peak talent: the top 10 pioneer researchers and entrepreneurs in AI since 2010 all have been or are associated with American companies. 7 of 10 were born outside the U.S. (Samuel Altman, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Mustafa Suleyman, Norman Shazeer.)
Where the elite AI workers train: Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Toronto, Oxford, Munich, Beijing and Tsinghua universities, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad. Also private company labs such as Google, Microsof, FAIR, the Paris branch of Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI), and Alibaba DAMO Academy (Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook).
China and the U.S. account for upwards of 75% of all college graduates with AI expertise. The U.S. has been and remains the top destination for graduate work, with a large share of Chinese AI college grads coming to the U.S. for advanced degrees. China now produces about half the world’s AI graduates, up from a quarter a few years ago. Outside of China and the U.S. the largest cohort of AI students is in India.
In the U.S., the percentage of job posting that reference AI in Linkedin is approaching 3% nationwide and 12% in California.
Where they work: well over 75% of elite AI workers work in the U.S. and China. There are much smaller AI workforces in the U.K, EU, Middle East, India and Canada. About 85% of OpenAi’s workforce works in the U.S.
Where elite AI workers are from: the U.S. and China have most of the top AI talent. Many have been drawn from outside the U.S. to the U.S. China is retaining an increasing share of its native born talent.
How much they are paid: In the U.S. the median AI worker is paid $250,000 and some are paid well in excess of $1M. On the eve of the launch of ChatGPT5, OpenAI granted bonuses to about 1,000 workers ranging from several hundred thousands of dollars to several millions. The top workers in American firms can earn over $5 million a year and receive stock. Compensation in other countries is less.
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