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The head of Amazon’s bid to create artificial general intelligence has shared how junior staffers can get ahead in AI, as talent wars create fierce competition for a select few.
Companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic have spent the summer jostling for AI talent, in some cases offering compensation packages worth tens of millions.
David Luan told The Verge’s “Decoder” podcast that he would put fewer than 1,000 people in the world into the top AI talent bracket and trust fewer than 150 people with a “giant dollar amount of compute” for a frontier AI lab.
But Luan said that some junior people could still climb the ranks in frontier AI in three to four years by asking the right questions, finding a problem that “nobody has the answer to,” and becoming an expert in that particular subdomain of AI.
“I find that really counterintuitive, that there’s only very few people who really know what they’re doing,” he said, adding, “It’s very easy in terms of number of years to become someone who knows what they’re doing.”
Luan, who helped build early versions of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said junior people coming from other fields, like quant finance or physics, can “make a massive difference” when they join AI companies — as long as they are surrounded by people with experience training models.
He also said that those early in their careers should join an AI company with smaller teams so they could try their own ideas, and go somewhere that has a “strong product sense” of how people embed AI into their own lives.
In addition to leading Amazon’s AGI Lab in San Francisco, Luan is the company’s vice president of autonomy. He joined Amazon in 2024 to spearhead its artificial general intelligence efforts after the company quasi-acquired his startup, Adept.
He told the “Decoder” podcast that he defines artificial general intelligence as “a model that can help a human do anything they want to do on a computer.”
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