New Delhi, Sept. 25 -- The job title reads the same on both offers: senior machine learning engineer. The first offer, from a Series C AI startup building enterprise workflow automation, comes in at $215,000 in total annual compensation, with a four-year equity grant at a company valued at $800 million. The second, from a frontier AI laboratory, comes in at $900,000: base salary, cash bonus, and annualized equity at a company valued in the hundreds of billions. The recruiter who spent six weeks closing the candidate on the first offer found out about the second on a Tuesday morning.

the AI labor market has bifurcated permanently into two distinct economies that share job titles, degrees, and LinkedIn formatting but almost nothing else. ...