The AI Industry Is Becoming Like Professional Sports

John Coogan (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, I love doing the podcast, but I'm kind of thinking about becoming a PhD level AI researcher. If I do a career pivot, it seems something I'm considering.

Tracy Alloway (0:35)

That's the place to be.

Joe Weisenthal (0:36)

Have you seen, have you seen like the salaries, supposedly, I still don't actually believe them, but have you seen like the salaries and comp packages that supposedly Meta and a few others are paying for top AI?

Tracy Alloway (0:48)

I have seen some of the headlines. I have also learned a bunch of new words like exploding offer and aqua hire.

Joe Weisenthal (0:55)

Oh, yeah.

Tracy Alloway (0:55)

I always thought exploding offer sounds dangerous. What you want is an explosive offer that you can't turn down.

Joe Weisenthal (1:00)

But I take it the exploding hire is like one that lasts like five minutes.

Tracy Alloway (1:03)

Yeah. So you have to make a decision right away and the company that you're currently working for can't counter offer.

Joe Weisenthal (1:09)

So I read these headlines about some engineer, something getting paid 100 million or 250 million. I actually literally don't believe them. Like I actually literally think that's fake news.

Tracy Alloway (1:18)

Really?

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

No, but I kind of don't.

Tracy Alloway (1:19)

Do you just think it's probably made up of like all this weird equity structure?

Joe Weisenthal (1:23)

Yeah, comp, but I'm sure it's not all upfront. Anyway, we sort of seem to be in a moment, and it's actually not just AI, I would say journalism, finance, etc. Where it's like the sportsification of a lot of different industries, individual talent, the demand for individual superstars on anything, doing very well.

Tracy Alloway (1:44)

I have a bunch of questions when it comes specifically to AI, such as what makes an AI talent? Because I assume if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're trying to assemble your AI dream team or something, okay, sure, you have like a level of technical insight, and maybe you hear people talking about, oh, this one guy is fantastic. But I assume it's not like you can look at their individual levels of code, and you can't see what they're doing on a daily basis. I don't know.

Joe Weisenthal (2:11)

I don't know either. I don't know anything about this stuff. But I'm really excited to say we do have the perfect guests, a couple of guys who are right in the middle of all of this, and also who have been ahead of the curve in terms of this, like I said, the sportsification of the industry. We're going to be speaking with John Coogan and Jordi Hays. They are the co-hosts of TBPN. It's a live show podcast. It's become one of my favorite new media properties. It exists, and I'm really excited. We have them both in the studio here with us today. So John and Jordi, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

John Coogan (2:45)

Thanks for having us.

Jordi Hays (2:46)

We're so excited to be here.

Joe Weisenthal (2:47)

I love, by the way, you guys make these baseball cards every time, so it's so clever. For those who are not paying attention, what do you sort of give the high-level overview of what you see happening in this crazy talent war? For people who don't know about this, what is actually going on, this talent war for people who know how to do AI or train a model or whatever it is?

John Coogan (3:09)

Yeah, the league or the MAG-7, the serious teams are all worth over a trillion dollars. Tesla's in a different kind of boat some days, but pretty much there's seven trillion plus dollar companies now, so there is an inordinate amount of money to flow around, and if you think about investing.1% of your market cap to make your business potentially 5% better, that's a trade you take all day. The number is staggering, but now you're seeing companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars. I think you mentioned that there's a lot of debate over whether that was fake news or not. They seem like they are very real offers, and they are indeed happening, and there's a whole bunch of different ways that you can kind of underwrite that, but we could start with going through just a little bit of the history here of how we got into this place or what these AI researchers are actually doing. I'm happy to kind of answer any question.