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I wouldn't worry too much about a "brain drain." It's telling that their go-to example of "brain drain" is a European who came to America and is considering returning. Here's what he says:
Sounds to me like there aren't many such positions in Europe, he's holding out hope they create them. I've heard IRL from scientists that it's pretty difficult to get jobs - many wind up writing apps as a result. Maybe that's a failure of society, if so, it's not one that can be placed at Trump's feet. (I say this as someone who doesn't like Trump.) It's not just tuna researchers either, see this video about astrophysicists, which is clearly a market where the supply of astrophysicists far exceeds the number of astrophysics jobs society is willing to fund:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8cEZM1lN5g
I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but someone with a PhD in physics- any physics subfield- almost certainly has economic opportunities for 'very strong math background person' which far exceed any salary that academia could conceivably offer. I suspect other hard science PhD types have a similar situation, even if it's something as boring as running quality control analysis on pharmaceuticals.
It seems like 'scientists doing commercial rather than research work' may not be entirely due to the lack of opportunities to do research.
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I can list a number of more serious cases of brain drain, though they have nothing to do with DOGE. For example, Dr. Wu Yonghui, former Vice President of Google DeepMind, «has joined ByteDance as the head of foundational research for its large model team, Seed, according to Chinese media outlet, Jiemian.» That was around January. By now, they've created a model Seed-Thinking-v1.5 that's on par or better than DeepSeek R1 with 2x fewer activated parameters and 3.5x smaller, trained in a significantly more mature way, here's the tech report; they have the greatest stash of compute in Asia and will accelerate from now.
That's off the top of my head because I've just read the report. But from personal communication, a great ton of very strong Chinese are not coming anymore, and many are going back, due to the racism of this admin, general sense of meh that the American culture and way of life increasingly evoke, and simply because China can offer better deals now – in terms of cost of living, public safety, infrastructure, and obvious personal affinities. This isn't like the previous decade where only ancient academics retired to teach in Tsinghua or whatever, these are brilliant researchers in their prime, carrying your global leadership on their shoulders.
If I were American, that'd worry me a lot.
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Interesting video, thanks for sharing.
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