You cannot outbid the AI labs, but you can outhire them
Sifted ran a piece this week on how companies can outcompete the AI labs on hiring, and the premise alone tells you where this market has landed. The labs move at what founders keep calling warp speed. They decide fast, they pay what they decide, and they treat a single senior technical hire as worth more than a quarter of roadmap. Everyone else is quietly advised to find a different axis to compete on.
The advice usually gets read as consolation, and that is the part most people miss. The labs are bidding hard for one narrow profile, the frontier researcher, and mostly they are bidding against each other. That leaves the far larger population of applied people, the engineers who take a model and make it survive contact with customers and data and regulation, priced as if nothing has changed. The bidding war is deafening in one corner of the market and oddly quiet everywhere else.
You will never outbid a frontier lab, but you can outbid every company still waiting for this market to calm down.
That quiet corner is the repricing I would act on. The roles that actually decide whether a company gets value from AI are applied ones: data engineering, evaluation, the unglamorous middle where a demo becomes something a customer depends on. Those people are not being chased by labs. They are being chased by nobody in particular, and they are available on terms an ordinary company can genuinely meet. Scope, ownership, a short line to the decision, and work that ships to real users are all things a lab cannot credibly promise.
For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Stop benchmarking your offers against lab compensation you were never going to match, and compete on the one variable you fully control, which is speed. Write the applied role you actually need, compress the process to a week, and decide while the candidate is still interested. The labs win on money. They should not also be winning on how long you take to make up your mind.
Planning a senior AI or data hire and want the market view first? We share it either way.
Send us the brief →