"Moreover, these firms are spending lavishly on one particular segment: top technical talent. Meta reportedly offered a single AI researcher, who had co-founded a start-up firm focused on training AI agents to use computers, a compensation package of $250million over four years (see go.nature.com/4qznsq1). Technology firms are also spending billions on reverse-acquihires' poaching the star staff members of start-ups without acquiring the companies themselves."
"A 2025 paper reported that this was especially true for young, highly cited scholars: researchers who were about five years into their careers and whose work ranked among the most cited were 100 times more likely to move to industry the following year than were ten-year veterans whose work received an average number of citations, according to a model based on data from nearly seven million papers1."
Big tech firms massively increased spending on AI in 2025, collectively investing US$380 billion on tools and projecting $650 billion this year to expand physical infrastructure such as data centres. Firms are allocating huge sums to recruit top technical talent, with reported compensation packages as large as $250 million over four years and billions spent on reverse-acquihires to poach start-up staff. Young, highly cited machine-learning researchers are leaving universities at much higher rates to join industry, with a 2025 analysis finding early-career, top-cited scholars far more likely to move than established peers. This outflow undermines academia's roles in curiosity-driven innovation, independent critique and ethical scrutiny.
Read at www.nature.com
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