The Battle for Brilliant Minds

As we enter a new, and potentially equally consequential arms race, fueled by rapid advances in the field of AI, this troubled history serves as a useful reminder of the importance of the human dimension of military-technological rivalry. In the global competition to develop artificial general intelligence, keeping close track of compute clusters, semi-conductor export controls, and large language models will prove critical. Far more consequential, however, will be developing a carefully tailored and ruthlessly pragmatic approach toward AI talent management. This strategy can be structured along three axes — which are not so much distinct as deeply interactive and mutually reinforcing in nature: preserving homegrown AI talent, capturing foreign AI talent, and targeting adversarial AI talent.