How to Win the AI Talent War
A billion dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?
"We have a basic need to believe in something greater than ourselves. We crave solace in the darkness, a light unto our path. Thanks to you, we’ve found meaning amid the Cosmos."
— Civilization VI
Introduction
The AI talent war is justified and rational.
The race to AGI will be won by attracting and retaining the people capable of building it. Yet recruits are regularly turning down offers in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions, even billions.
So how do you win the talent war?
In Civ VI terms, the win condition is not a Domination Victory but a Religious Victory: you win by converting others to your vision of the future, instilling faith in your ability to lead them to the promised land, and persuading them that you are destined to prevail.
Money is necessary but not sufficient.
Over-reliance on comp reduces companies to ATMs and people to chattel. It also messes up internal dynamics and external vibes, and if your main selling point is short-term liquidity then you won’t get true believers.
Beyond dollars and GPUs, here’s how to get (and keep!) the best researchers and engineers.
How to win
1 Mandate of Heaven
Victory is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because beliefs prompt actions: if the best people believe you will win, then they will join you and their friends will join you and you will win.
In short: the hyperstitional power of foreshadowing your inevitable triumph attracts the people who will secure it for you.
For a recruit to believe that their equity will be valuable, they have to believe that the company will win. The leadership needs to have the right strategic vision for where this is going, and the team needs to have the ability to pull it off.
Even in purely financial terms, $50MM of today’s equity from a lab that ends up #1 will ultimately be worth more than $100MM of today’s equity from a lab that ends up an also-ran.
The more AGI-pilled someone is, the more it matters to be on the winning team and the more irrational it is to choose a different team just for a short-term payday. Who wants to be the guy who went off chasing a quick buck while your competitors breathed life into a machine?
Winners want to join the winning team.
2 Clear mission
For elite talent, money is abundant while time is scarce. These people can afford to trade money for fulfillment, and they frequently do. We’ve all seen many instances of researchers turning down huge offers in favor of working on something they believe in, whether that’s safety or open access or the pursuit of truth.
The importance of mission is heightened to unprecedented levels now that it’s not just “make a better CRM” but something closer to “summon the correct deity.”
Highly skilled people want their work to be meaningful, so it’s important to clearly and precisely articulate a righteous cause.
Generic mission statements sound like disingenuous corpo slop and will make people think you’re phoning it in, if they even remember it (they won’t). Define a mission that couldn’t belong to any other company, then put it in every job posting, offer letter, interview, all-hands, and strategy document until you project “Cato the Elder calling for the destruction of Carthage” levels of resolve.
Note: In addition to attracting the right people, a clear mission can help repel the wrong people. Misaligned employees create painful and expensive problems through leaking, defecting, complaining, or worse.
3 Kleos
Men will literally pursue glory instead of going to therapy. Your top talent should have direct access to leadership, autonomy to make technical decisions, and freedom to take on ambitious new quests.
Above all, offer the opportunity to try things, take risks, and fail without penalty. History is made when extraordinary people FAFO.
4 Esprit de corps
Once you’ve locked in on the mission, instill an “us against the world” mentality where departures feel like defections and resisting poaching attempts confers status. Create rituals that build morale, pride, and unit cohesion around your shared purpose, like the IDF’s beret ceremony or the Marine Corps’ annual birthday cake cutting. And if you’re an underdog, treat that as the luxury it is and use it for fuel.
Aim for the kind of spirit that made a soldier in the 101st Airborne say during WWII, “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”
5 Star factory
Reward excellence; give the best people opportunities for leadership and influence. Many researchers want to shape the direction of AI, and they understand that their leverage in influencing outcomes will diminish quickly as AGI approaches.
Celebrate individual achievement and mint luminaries. When you’re in the spotlight, redirect credit to colleagues whose work made the success possible. Go beyond “team effort” bromides and acknowledge specific contributions. Create “bonus content” about their work behind the scenes, or establish internal awards for technical excellence and celebrate the winners throughout the company or publicly. Maybe give them a budget to present their work at events or just host dinners for their peers.
Note: This can be uncomfortable, because it feels like publicizing a shopping list for poaching. But long term, the way you keep great people is by providing an environment to do their life’s work and be recognized for it, not by hiding their light under a bushel hoping that nobody else would want them. And the loyalty you accrue by investing in their advancement ultimately outweighs the marginal increase in poaching risk.
6 Network effects
Breakthroughs are better with friends. Talent density benefits from network effects: companies, like cities, thrive when ambitious people gather in sufficient density to pull in their peers.
And that positive feedback loop goes in both directions: compromising on talent quality now means compromising your ability to recruit later.
7 Recruits as recruiters
Being recruited by a friend who’s genuinely stoked about their job is the most effective form of headhunting, and you should equip your new hires to do this.
Get them mission-pilled right away, introduce them to your top leaders, give them high-impact projects quickly. New hires get bombarded with “How’s it going?” texts in their first month, and if they’re convinced that joining this company was the smartest decision ever, they’ll become powerful evangelists to their friends and peers.
8 Freedom to cook
The best workers love work, and they hate not-work. Not-work includes navigating bureaucracy, dealing with office politics, dealing with regular politics, doing reports about the work they did, and having to talk to the HR department.
Just as Michelangelo “removed everything that is not David,” you should remove everything that is not building AI. You and the company will inevitably have to manage some process and politics, but go out of your way to avoid inflicting this pain on your top hitters.
In the hiring process, kill all friction and latency. Interview fast, make offers fast, onboard fast. Speed shows respect and competence, while sluggishness signals dysfunction.
9 Leadership
Julius Caesar's men didn't fight for Rome; they fought for Caesar.
Great talent demands a great leader — someone they like, respect, admire, and would be proud to follow. People enlist for causes, but they fight for generals.
Many in AI have made career decisions based on wanting to work with someone they perceive as a trustworthy manager or a legendary scientist or a generational entrepreneur.
A leader is also the exemplar for their company. I once heard a military historian say that throughout all of human history, there have only ever been three ways to make people do things: reward, punishment, or example.
In the context of recruiting and retention, “reward” is obvious and “punishment” is probably illegal. That leaves “example.” If you’re seen as a true believer, your people will believe. If you’re seen as loyal, they will reciprocate. Conversely, if you’re seen as opportunistic or self-interested, why wouldn’t your people similarly look out for themselves?
10 Momentum
Always signal confidence and momentum. When things don’t go as planned, demonstrate the ability to learn and move forward. Never be defensive; never cope and seethe.
Maintain the initiative by consistently making moves, sharing news, announcing hires, and marking milestones. Announce things yourself so you control the narrative, since it’ll leak anyway. Force competitors to respond to your agenda rather than setting their own. Become the center of gravity for where the most important work is happening.
Conclusion
Neither deeper pockets nor a head start can overcome better talent. The talent war is existential, and in that war, victory is earned not bought. It’s earned through things like vision, virtue, camaraderie, opportunity, and leadership.
Consider the Cold War. We didn’t prevail just because we had deeper pockets or a larger arsenal. We won because our vision for the future was better. We won because, when the Berlin Wall came down, people wanted to go from East to West. We won because we had Reagan.
The AI talent war will play out similarly. The winner will be the company that can convince the world’s most extraordinary researchers and engineers that this is the place you’ll write your legacy, this is the leader to bet your career on, and this is the team that will one day run lightning through quartz and give mankind new meaning amid the Cosmos.
Thanks to , , Sholto Douglas, and for reading drafts — as well as to the unnamed people who shared their own experience evaluating offers. In lieu of $100M, please accept my gratitude.
You should do Q&A with a talent agent for this world (anonymous could work!)