In artificial intelligence, compute and data matter, but people matter more. Behind every breakthrough model, every infrastructure leap, and every “revolutionary” chatbot lies a shrinking pool of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians capable of building them. The defining constraint on the next decade of AI isn’t just hardware: it’s human capital. Across the world, a quiet arms race is unfolding for that capital. The most advanced AI firms, like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, Google, and a few in China, are no longer competing just for customers or GPUs. They are competing for brains. The new concentration of intelligence In the past...