• Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Young, successful AI researchers are increasingly choosing to leave academia for industry.Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty In 2025, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta collectively spent US$380 billion on building artificial-intelligence tools. • That number is expected to surge still higher this year, to $650 billion, to fund the building of physical infrastructure, such as data centres (seego.nature.com/3lzf79q). • Moreover, these firms are spending lavishly on one particular segment: top technical talent. • Meta reportedly offered a single AI researcher, who had co-founded a start-up firm focused on training AI agents to use computers, a compensation package of $250 million over four years (seego.nature.com/4qznsq1). • Technology firms are also spending billions on ‘reverse-acquihires’ - poaching the star staff members of start-ups without acquiring the companies themselves. • Eyeing these generous payouts, technical experts earning more modest-salaries might well reconsider their career choices (see ‘Academic brain drain’).
Article Summaries:
- Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Why sky-high pay for AI researchers is bad for the future of science To ensure that AI advances benefit everyone, scientific institutions must prioritize collaborative, mission-driven structures instead of chasing top talent with astronomical compensation. Bruce Sch
Sources: