Yi Tay on hiring for frontier AI teams, seniority, and publication norms

Yi Tay, who recently hired a full AI team from thousands of applications, says PhDs are still a reasonable training ground and that candidates often get noticed through strong work they publish.

He argues that seniority matters little in today's LLM world, and that being at the cutting edge outweighs external social media visibility. He also disagrees with the view that being a middle author on many papers is a negative signal.