Here's Who's Winning the Global Fight for AI Talent

Damien Ma (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Joe Weisenthal (0:04)

Podcasts, radio, news.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:22)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

Joe, have you watched The Three Body Problem?

Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

No, but I really want to. And I didn't read the book, so in case you're gonna ask that.

I wanna do that too, but I intend to at some point.

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

There goes my carefully crafted intro where we talk about the three body problem.

Okay, well this will work. Well, as everyone knows, except for Joe, there's sort of two types of people in the world when it comes to the three body problem. There are those who see it as an allegory for climate change. So humans coming together to unite against a common threat, which in this case, since you haven't read the book, is an alien invasion.

Joe Weisenthal (0:59)

I did, a friend of mine this weekend told me like two plot points.

Tracy Alloway (1:03)

Okay, good, good, good. Okay, and then there are also those who see it as sort of an allegory for the trade or tech war between the US and China. So the idea that humans are going up up against a much more technologically advanced opponent. And in this scenario, I guess earth is China and the aliens are the US.

Well, today we are firmly in that second camp. We're gonna talk about US China rivalry in tech and in particular, one area of tech, AI.

Joe Weisenthal (1:35)

Right, so obviously AI, AI, AI, everyone talks about it all the time.

We don't really know where it's gonna go, but we know a few things in the meantime, which is that people are spending money like crazy on chips, but they're also spending money like crazy on talent and anyone who is capable of doing sort of cutting edge research in AI, from what I can tell based on articles I write, they basically just get to pick where they wanna work and basically pick their salary. There's a great article in the information a couple of weeks ago about Facebook hiring top researchers without even doing an interview. It's like, if you know this stuff, someone will hire you and pay you a lot of money.

Tracy Alloway (2:11)

Yeah, and I have so many questions in this space. So first of all, who is an AI talent or what is an AI talent? Where do they come from? Is it the same as being a software engineer, but you have a slightly different area of expertise? I really don't know. And then secondly, I'm kinda curious how fungible the jobs are from what you just said and the fact that companies are hiring without interviews and things like that and that demand is so strong. It seems like you can just do AI anywhere, whether it's China or the US or somewhere else in the world or whether it's a specific company versus another one. But so many questions on this AI talent war, I guess you could say.

Joe Weisenthal (2:51)

Totally, and there's two things. So I sort of consider myself a bit of an AI talent because I think I'm pretty good at coming up with ChatGPT.

Tracy Alloway (2:58)

You are actually, listeners, I have learned a lot from watching Joe enter his prompts and I still find it incredibly endearing that you say please and thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (3:07)

Well, it's important for when AI becomes sentient that they're gonna remember who said please and thank you.

But beyond that, there's this other element and you already sort of eluded to it, but it's clear that for whatever reason, countries feel like AI almost as if it's a commodity, there must be some every country or there's this narrative being pushed by the industry. And maybe it's just a narrative to sell chips or subscriptions to the open AI APIs, et cetera. But there seems to be this narrative that every country must have some sort of homegrown AI strategy or data center or something. Like something about this technology seems to engender political and nationalistic anxieties.

Tracy Alloway (3:52)

Yes, I think that's absolutely true. And we're back to sort of the three body, geopolitical tension point. But I am very pleased to say that we, in fact, have the perfect guest to talk about all of this. We're going to be speaking with Damien Ma. He is the managing director at MacroPolo, which is the think tank at the Paulson Institute.

And they publish something called the Global AI Talent Tracker. So actually keeping track of where AI talent is coming from, how much there is and where it's going. So Damien, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.