As entry-level job seekers stockpile advanced degrees to protect themselves against the threat of artificial intelligence, the CEO of one of the biggest social media companies says many AI engineers may not even need a prestigious degree to be seen as top-tier talent.
Instead of needing to obtain the highest level of education, Adam Mosseri, CEO and president of Instagram, said that AI engineers have two characteristics in common: they are resilient and learn quickly.
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“These are people who learn very quickly and actively experiment,” Mosseri said on an episode of the Good Guys podcast, hosted by Josh Peck and Ben Soffer.
Mosseri added that this new generation of AI talent looks very different from the traditional Silicon Valley engineer.
“It’s a much more resilient type of engineer or researcher, in fact, than most of the professionals that the Valley has historically hired, who are much more like, ‘This is the right way to build a database that serves millions of people across multiple data centers, where there’s a right way to do it, and that you could write a PhD about.’”
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“That’s not it. There are PhDs involved in research, sure, working in the research field, but the people who are doing the applied work — it’s a small group of people,” he added.
Mosseri said one of the main reasons salaries have become inflated to attract top AI talent is that it’s not something you can learn in school because it’s so new.
“A lot of them are in their early twenties,” he said. “There are a lot of techniques and technologies that are evolving very quickly,” he said.
In Silicon Valley, the war for AI talent has become intensely competitive in 2025. Tech giants like Meta have reportedly offered compensation packages in the range of $100 million to recruit OpenAI employees.
Mosseri said that while the advertised offers may be quite exaggerated, they still involve a lot of money — and there is a very small group of people capable of working on cutting-edge AI models.
“There is huge competition to hire this talent, which is driving up the cost of hiring these people,” said Mosseri. “Some of these techniques are decades old, but much of it is completely innovative, and everyone is learning as they go.”
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Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire founder of Scale AI who now leads superintelligence efforts at Meta, says “vibe-coding” — or using AI to generate and refine software code through natural language commands — has enormous potential for young programmers. In his view, spending time using AI tools now can provide a transformative career advantage in the future.
“When personal computers came along, the people who spent the most time with them and grew up with them had a huge advantage in the future economy — like the Bill Gateses and even the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world,” the Gen Z co-founder said on the TBPN podcast. “I think that moment is happening now.”
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