Wall Street and Silicon Valley are locked in a fierce bidding war for a tiny pool of elite math graduates and Ph.D.s, with quant firms and AI labs offering million-dollar compensation packages to secure top talent.

Early-career packages pushing seven figures, once anomalies, are now standard. "A million dollars is something people don't even bat an eye at anymore," said Matt Stabile, founder of Stabile Search. He marks the shift as "pre-Open AI and post-Open AI," when competition intensified.

The skills for training large language models overlap heavily with quantitative finance. As trading firms pivot toward machine learning and AI to power trades, Open AI and Anthropic now vie for the same genius math majors, deepening the talent crunch.