[WinLychee]

Sort of, you will probably attract the best talent by having the hardest problems, fostering a culture of bottom-up innovation, and giving your engineers a lot of freedom rather than micro-managing them. The pay is closely related, but you also get a lot of people trying to game the system and optimize for max pay, without necessarily the skill or creativity you're looking for. Said another way: top pay attracts people looking for top pay, for better or worse. There's probably a strong correlation between "best" people and high pay, but it's also hard to quantify "best".

How do you quantify best? Number of degrees? Publications? Association with prestigious institutions? Past work experience at top companies? Speed of problem solving? All of this is gameable once it starts being _measured_ and enough incentives exist for people to devote their life to winning the "game".

However, if you happen to hire a math olympiad winning PhD with numerous publications from a tier-1 research institution with a known track record in industry, it would be hard to argue they aren't the best. But success breeds success, and top people will keep being poached to other top places. Kinda how money makes more money.

[Gunnerhead]

> How do you qualify the best?

We’ll, by the number of Leetcode Hards they’ve completed, of course! /s

[quadcore]

How do you quantify best?

The bests have cool stories to tell.

[WinLychee]

Right, but you have to be in a position where you get to do the work in the first place, which requires passing some reputational and skill bar. Or, you could do something which is cool to you personally and someone might not share that feeling and be unimpressed.

As a concrete example, I've gotten more accolades for silly personal projects that sound impressive, like training a convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU, than for impactful work at my actual job, which was a lot less challenging.

I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy, and I think companies could really get far hiring less than the best people, and just squeezing good quality work out of them (I believe Amazon is known for this).

Obviously OpenAI should not hire subpar people lol, they should keep doing what works for them, just grumbling loudly here.

[quadcore]

convolutional network to pilot a simulated car on the GPU

Seems silly enough to get you somewhere cool. Though the best pass is recommendation. Impress your colleagues so bad, they will recommend you somewhere one day.

than for impactful work at my actual job

Oh you have to fight hard to get one of those. You cant just do what you're told. Ive got a cool story to tell from my time at amazon but I fought heroically to get it (I was younger though).

I guess hiring is just incredibly noisy

Careful what you believe because your belief becomes your reality.

If you want to be great, you cant just act and think like anybody else. Work on yourself and be great. Get the mindset first.

"life has strange ways"

[WinLychee]

This is honestly kind of motivational, thank you. Currently building a GPU rig to get back into deep learning, I want to hack on the open-source end of AI efforts, and we'll see what comes of it.