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Only about 20 to 30 people in California truly know how to build high-quality AI models, making this talent extraordinarily scarce and expensive

Adcock estimates that only 20-30 people in California have the deep expertise needed to build high-quality AI models. This scarcity explains Meta's aggressive recruiting strategy of paying tens of millions in guaranteed compensation to attract this rare talent. ✦ AI generated

Brett Adcock · My First Million · 2026-08-14 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 30:24

I think there's probably my rough calculus now is probably like a rough back of the envelope is probably like 20 to 30 people in California know how to build really good AI models.

verbatim transcript · starts at 30:24

Transcript · around this moment

30:04it, do you respect it? Do you just think it's a fool's higher end? What do you think of that? >> I really like it. I think like the AI space is what I found is the folks that really understand how to do like language pre-training and mid-training and post- training especially pre-training and the infra around supercomputing and data and evals and all the right stuff you need to get put

30:24in place to do that right and the amount of folks that really understand the right kind of like recipes that transformers do well in in you know arounde or whatever you're going to look at I think is really hard to find it's actually really hard to find the actual folks that know what they're doing. I think there's probably my rough calculus now is probably like a rough back of the

30:40envelope is probably like 20 to 30 people in California know how to build really good AI models. >> Wait, so but is that trickling down? So you said that there was a senior guy, but like are even some of the less than senior, the 20somes, the young 30omes, are they still getting eight figures a year? >> No, the like the junior guys like the guys in like their 20s and like the like

31:01late 20s or something are getting like they're making like a few million total. So they're making like 200 250 in base. They're making like another million or whatever like in in a year in like our shoes every year. And so they're going to pay like a million to like you know like 750 to like 2 million or so range per year. >> And that's uh that's been driven up by

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