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AI Talent Market / Researcher Comp

$100M+ packages as a scarce-input chokepoint

The 2025 talent war (Meta's reported $100M+ offers, mass poaching for its Superintelligence Lab) exposed elite researchers as the scarcest input in AI. Talent concentration and non-competes function as a real moat and a cost line that reshapes lab economics.

2025 signal

$100M+ packages

How it fits the stack

AI Talent Market / Researcher Comp with what it depends on (above) and what it feeds (below). The figure renders as a crawlable diagram and upgrades to an interactive 3D graph as it scrolls into view.

depends ondepends ondepends onAI Talent Market /Researcher CompLabsMeta AI (FAIR)Safe Superintelligence(SSI)Thinking Machines Lab
AI Talent Market / Researcher CompFeeds ↓

AI Talent Market / Researcher Comp in the AI stack. AI Talent Market / Researcher Comp with its immediate upstream dependencies (top) and downstream dependents (bottom) in the AI value chain. Hover a node in 3D, or read the full relationships below.

Graph data (text) — 4 entities, 3 relationships
  • Meta AI (FAIR)depends onAI Talent Market / Researcher Comp
  • Safe Superintelligence (SSI)depends onAI Talent Market / Researcher Comp
  • Thinking Machines Labdepends onAI Talent Market / Researcher Comp