The war for AI talent is heating up

By Simon Long Editor-at-large The Economist. Here in Britain we are watching the European elections as outsiders for the first time. You can follow the results as they come in on our election tracker, followed, not long after this newsletter is sent, by our analysis of what they mean. In the previous poll, in 2019, held between the Brexit referendum and actual departure from the EU, Britons had the vote and, on a turnout of 37%, the election was, perhaps predictably, won here by what was then the Brexit Party. Britain’s experience since then has been less an inspiration to EU-sceptics elsewhere in the union than a cautionary tale. But much attention will still be paid to the rise of other right-wing and far-right groups.Perhaps an even bigger difference from the election in 2019 than Britain’s absence is the presence of war on the continent, and a greater awareness of the threat posed by an aggressive Russia. That is one reason why it is alarming that a probable outcome of the election is a period of political rudderlessness, and of EU introspection as its members jostle for the plum jobs in Brussels.Here in Britain, more attention will be paid to campaigning for our own general election on July 4th. One topic that is surprisingly little discussed—at least explicitly in public forums—in a country with an ethnic-minority prime minister battling for re-election, is the role of race in the campaign. Perhaps even more surprising, as a fascinating piece of analysis we have just published explains, is that the most important ethnic group in British politics is the one that nobody talks about.On the topic of elections, I should apologise for predicting last week that India’s result might not be very exciting. I ought to have known better. I covered the upset in India in 2004 when, as this year, an incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party did much less well than exit polls had predicted (leading to the surprising installation as prime minister of Manmohan Singh, and one of my favourite Economist covers).Perhaps as much of a global obsession this year as the politics of elections is the rise and rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI). A good place to look for evidence of this is the jobs market. As our new piece explains, AI experts have become to many industries what high-scoring centre-forwards are to the football transfer market: high-priced and sought-after. In contrast to the world of football, however, the trend is not towards the concentration of talent in a few elite clubs, but to the distribution of expertise, once hoarded by tech giants, across business more generally.The latest edition of our weekly history quiz, Dateline, is now live. Again, I was undone by one question. Surely a mere 11 years out is worth something (anything more than a ten-year inaccuracy scores zero)? Last week I asked whether Donald Trump’s felony convictions would make any difference to the election in November. Respondents seemed split more or less evenly. Some, like Ken Derow in Pennsylvania, thought that once people have had time to think about it, Mr Trump’s chances of re-election will be “significantly reduced”. Others, like Joe Roach, thought it would make “no material difference”. Frank Wiesebron in Paris had a third, gloomy, view: “The worst impact of Donald Trump becoming a convicted felon is the effort by the Republicans to delegitimise all legal proceedings. The damage will be colossal.”