Highly competitive AI compensation has forced companies to create a 'god tier' of pay for top technical talent.

45:49was, you know, when you were building a software company in the age of the PC, you had four tier chip talent because you weren't building a chip. All right? The point is, if you're an AI company and you feel the need to build a frontier model, then yes, you've put yourself in direct competition with someone. And if you don't have the good people, you're toast. So what you got to

46:10do is make the model a compliment and have a tier talent at UI A tier talent at you know AI implementation AR talent at the things that you have your competitive advantage in right but yeah you're probably not going to even the very best companies that are taking open- source model open weight models and fine-tuning them right they should be experts at fine-tuning they should be expert on their data domain but they're

46:34probably not going to be as good at kind of building an LLM from scratch as the guys who doing for the last three years but that's okay. One tough thing though that is happening that for sure um is that I think when we started this show there started to be sort of two tracks on compensation right which is I have to have I have to break my salary bands for

46:52my AI guys because they're worth so much to anthropic and that's true >> now we're seeing three bands of compensation we're seeing the regular human beings then we're seeing the AI guys and then we're seeing the one the one to five superstars that we're talking about right that I have to uh that I have to find a seven figure package for as an early stage startup because they're going to get it right

47:16and and they and I have to provide them everything the outsiz equity the outsiz cash and there are especially when you talk for folks that are mature the 100 million and up AR guys 200 million up they all have this this god tier now of compensation and it's and if you have the revenue it's sort of fine right you can afford if you're doing 200 million in revenue you you can have four god

47:38tier employees it's not going to break your your your model. Um, but it does it it is a big it is something that folks have had to accept. Um, I I there's a bunch of CEOs I work with informally that I'm not an investor with that I work with at that scale and they've all created god tiers. They're like, I got four guys. I they are the core of my

47:54next generation product. Okay? They're all making seven figures. They all have like they all have equity stakes 10 times what an employee at this late stage would have and the the best investment I've made like this god tier. And um I it's just but it's tough on the rest of the team, right? Because it's not the way we used to do this Kumbaya style when uh when you've got this god

48:16tier. It's tough. But if you you're not going to pull off you're not going to pull off a palunteer or an intercom without a god tier. You need a skunk works and you need a god tier or it ain't going to work. It's just the sire the siren call of the anthropic comp is too high. Openai just did a secondary of seven billion, didn't it? This week