Citadel's Ken Griffin Says Frontier AI Labs Are Offering New Grads $500,000, Leaving Finance Unable to Compete

Citadel founder Ken Griffin says the pay packages that leading artificial intelligence labs are dangling in front of new graduates have reached roughly $500,000 a year, a level he argues traditional finance simply cannot match. Speaking on a Goldman Sachs stage, Griffin described the emerging talent war in blunt terms: students leaving school with their sights set on frontier AI can command half a million dollars annually, and, in his words, there is nothing employers outside that arena can do to compete.