Dumb question. If they’re willing to pay so much for AI talent. Why won’t companies hire experienced software engineers willing to learn AI on the job? Seems like there should be a big market for that.
However, skilling people up on specialized skill sets in a reasonable time frame requires having people around to teach them. And those people need to know not just the skills, but how to teach them well. And it takes time away from those people doing the job, so that approach will slow development in the short run.
But the companies are trying.
you are on the right, but only for companies investing for the long term
It is definitely worth spending a couple hundred million to make your stock price go up tens of billions for several months.
Presumably not all of that hundreds of millions in investment will be waste, too.
Meta knows they have close to a 0% chance of overtaking ChatGPT or Gemini.