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Fireship: 'Silicon Valley's Greatest Talent Heist Just Paid Off... Kind Of'
Fireship covers the outcome of the mega-package AI researcher poaching wave — the nine-figure offers that dominated 2025-2026 hiring — and the qualified verdict on whether the acquired talent actually shipped proportionate results. The 'kind of' is the story: the framing is that headline compensation has not cleanly converted into model leadership for the acquiring labs. This is the counter-data point to the prevailing 'talent is the only moat' narrative, and it lands as hiring signal for anyone reading the engineering market.
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