Economists track 213,000 expert hires and $540M paid to train AI
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-13
A new paper by Alberto Cavallo, Zoë Cullen and Andrew Koh tracks 213,000 expert hires and an estimated $540M in posted-rate payouts (Nov 2025–Sep 2026) on a leading platform where AI labs buy expertise. Key findings: hiring and wages in a domain fall as its training corpus accumulates; demand arrives in waves, with most postings filling within four weeks; global starting wages exceed the US full-time equivalent before declining; domains hired later are those with bigger gaps between potential and observed AI use. The market could add $19B to GDP by 2030.
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