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How to spot a genius
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A more extreme scarcity mindset about superstar talent drives the scramble among firms – and helps explain the premium now placed on brains.
ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO
The Economist
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Mr Ervin Macic was despondent. While in school he twice won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and researched artificial intelligence (AI), trying to speed up how models make predictions.
He dreamed of one day joining an AI lab to make the technology safe. Yet the 19-year-old Bosnian prodigy was unable to take a spot at the University of Oxford: its fees of £60,000 (S$104,000) a year were five times his family’s annual income. So he went to the University of Sarajevo, where he sat programming exams on a decades-old IBM computer.
