Human resources: finding the world's hidden talent

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  The Economist Hello, Alice Fullwood here.

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  Co-host of Money Talks, our weekly podcast on markets, the economy, and business.

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  Welcome to Editors Picks.

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  You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.

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  Thanks for listening.

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  Erwin Machich was despondent.

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  While in school he twice won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and researched artificial intelligence,

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  trying to speed up how models make predictions,

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  he dreamed of one day joining an AI lab to make the technology safe.

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  Yet the 19-year-old Bosnian prodigy was unable to take a place at the University of Oxford,

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  its fees of £60,000 a year were five times his family's annual income,

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  so he went to the University of Sarajevo, where he sat programming exams on a decades-old computer.

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  Mr Machitch's case is far from unique.

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  Around the world vast amounts of talent go to waste.

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  Economists speak of lost Einstein's,

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  who might have produced transformative work had they been identified and nurtured.

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  Nowhere are the consequences clearer than in AI,

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  where the scarcity of top researchers allows a tiny carder to command CEO-level pay.

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  Governments that lavish billions on semiconductors to win the AI race neglect the talent that drives progress.

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  Brains, treated with the same urgency as chips, could prove a better longer-term investment.

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