Two Year's Contract

A huge, unspoken inefficiency in the AI industry is the "acqui-hire tour of duty." A star researcher or small team gets hired for an absurd amount of money, works for two years until their stock vests, contributes very little that gets integrated, and then leaves to start a new company and repeat the cycle.

Big companies are effectively paying nine-figure retention bonuses for two years of PR and to keep talent away from competitors. It's a terrible way to build institutional knowledge. The real work is done by the tenured, less famous engineers who actually maintain the training infrastructure and know which datasets are poisoned.

This isn't a sustainable way to build products. It creates a mercenary culture where long-term ownership is nonexistent. You can't build the next computing platform on a series of two-year contracts.