The war for AI talent is heating up

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Greetings from London

The results from the European Parliament elections held in the past few days are in—and make uncomfortable reading for the leaders of the EU’s two biggest countries. In Germany, Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats trailed in third, behind the hard-right Alternative for Germany. In France, where Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally came top, President Emmanuel Macron has responded by calling a snap parliamentary election. Elsewhere centrists held their own rather better against populist parties. We’ve published our initial analysis of the results (which are summarised in our election tracker) and we’ll have more to say about Mr Macron’s gamble later today.

Here in Britain, more attention will be paid to campaigning for our own general election on July 4th. One topic that is surprisingly little discussed—at least explicitly in public forums—in a country with an ethnic-minority prime minister battling for re-election, is the role of race in the campaign. Perhaps even more surprising, as a fascinating piece of analysis we have just published explains, is that the most important ethnic group in British politics is the one that nobody talks about.

On the topic of elections, I should apologise for predicting last week that India’s result might not be very exciting. I ought to have known better. I covered the upset in India in 2004 when, as this year, an incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party did much less well than exit polls had predicted (leading to the surprising installation as prime minister of Manmohan Singh, and one of my favourite Economist covers).

Perhaps as much of a global obsession this year as the politics of elections is the rise and rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). A good place to look for evidence of this is the jobs market. As our piece explains, AI experts have become to many industries what high-scoring centre-forwards are to the football transfer market: high-priced and sought-after. In contrast to the world of football, however, the trend is not towards the concentration of talent in a few elite clubs, but to the distribution of expertise, once hoarded by tech giants, across business more generally.

The latest edition of our weekly history quiz, Dateline, is now live. Again, I was undone by one question. Surely a mere 11 years out is worth something (anything more than a ten-year inaccuracy scores zero)?

Thank you as always for your mails. Last week I asked whether Donald Trump’s felony convictions would make any difference to the election in November. Respondents seemed split more or less evenly. Some, like Ken Derow in Pennsylvania, thought that once people have had time to think about it, Mr Trump’s chances of re-election will be “significantly reduced”. Others, like Joe Roach, thought it would make “no material difference”. Frank Wiesebron in Paris had a third, gloomy, view: “The worst impact of Donald Trump becoming a convicted felon is the effort by the Republicans to delegitimise all legal proceedings. The damage will be colossal.”

We read all your emails and appreciate them. Adam Roberts will be back in this chair next week, and will be looking forward to them. You can reach him at economisttoday@economist.com.

Simon Long, Editor-at-large

Recommended reads

The war for AI talent is heating up

Pity OpenAI’s HR department. Since the start of the year the maker of ChatGPT, the hit artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, has lost about a dozen top researchers. The biggest name was Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder responsible for many of the startup’s big breakthroughs, who announced his resignation on May 14th. He did not give a reason, though many suspect that it is linked to his attempt to oust Sam Altman (pictured), the firm’s boss, last December. Whatever the motivation, the exodus is not unusual at OpenAI. According to one estimate, of the 100-odd AI experts the firm has hired since 2016, about half have left.

As the French hard right triumphs in EU elections, Macron calls snap vote

The elections to the European Parliament held on June 6th-9th have delivered a stinging rebuke from voters to some incumbents, most clearly in Germany and above all in France, where president Emmanuel Macron responded to his party’s routing at the hands of the hard right by dissolving the French parliament and calling a risky snap election.

Is it better to be an early bird or a night owl?

Rare is the chief executive who extols the virtues of a lie-in. Tim Cook, boss of Apple, maker of the iPhone, wakes between 4am and 5am. So does Bob Iger, his counterpart at Disney, a media giant. According to one survey, two-thirds of the chief executives of large American companies are up by 6 o’clock; for average Americans the share is less than one in three. For those aspiring to corporate greatness, the message seems clear: you snooze, you lose.

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