News Summary

• The San Francisco Bay Area is in the midst of an AI frenzy that makes the California Gold Rush of the mid-19th century look like a scavenger hunt.
• Top programmers and developers are being offered compensation packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to switch firms.
• Young engineers lucky enough to have joined leading AI startups early are contemplating retirement before age 35.
• Governments that fail to secure a place in the AI supply chain may find themselves confronting mass job displacement without the tax revenues or state capacity needed to contain the social and political fallout.