Big tech firms collectively spent $380 billion on AI in 2025, with individual researcher compensation packages reaching $250 million. This spending is accelerating an 'AI brain drain' from academia, with young, highly-cited ML researchers up to 100x more likely to move to industry. The piece argues the lone-genius hiring strategy is misguided—research consistently shows collaborative teams produce more impactful science. Three alternatives are proposed for universities: commit to public-interest AI (citing Switzerland's open Apertus LLM as a model), distribute salaries more equitably rather than concentrating pay at the top, and offer distinctive intellectual and civic rewards that industry cannot match, including defending researchers' intellectual freedom.
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