Nikolai Yakovenko: the $200 million AI engineer

Aug 2, 2025

Nikolai Yakovenko, CEO of DeepNewz and former research scientist at Google and Twitter, discusses the evolution of AI and its impact on the news industry. He highlights the fierce competition in AI, especially concerning Meta's multi-million dollar talent strategy. Yakovenko reflects on the balance between creative AI models and user guidance, and dives into the challenges posed by energy consumption in data centers. Their conversation touches on the significance of automation in the workforce and speculates on the future of various AI applications.

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INSIGHT

OpenAI's Resilient Leadership

OpenAI leads AI with dominant market share and innovation despite major staff departures.
It evolved like the ship of Theseus, continuously rebuilding yet remaining at the forefront.

INSIGHT

Thinking Models Explained

Thinking models draft, edit, and reconsider outputs internally without explicit user commands.
They yield less hand-holding and more cohesive, refined AI-generated content.

ANECDOTE

AI Essay Writing Experience

Nikolai uses AI models to write undergraduate-level essays, scoring around C+.
This reflects AI's current utility in academia for basic writing but not advanced research.

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On this episode of Unsupervised Learning, in the wake of Elon Musk’s xAI Grok chatbot turning anti-Semitic following a recent update, Razib catches up with Nikolai Yakovenko about the state of AI in the summer of 2025. Nearly three years after their first conversations on the topic, the catch up, covering ChatGPT’s release and the anticipation of massive macroeconomic transformations driven by automation of knowledge-work. Yakovenko is a former professional poker player and research scientist at Google, Twitter (now X) and Nvidia (now the first $4 trillion company). With more than a decade on the leading edge computer science, Yakovenko has been at the forefront of the large-language-model revolution that was a necessary precursor to the rise of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, as well as hundreds of smaller startups. Currently, he is the CEO of DeepNewz, an AI-driven news startup that leverages the latest models to retrieve the ground-truth on news-stories. Disclosure: Razib actively uses and recommends the service and is an advisor to the company.

Razib and Yakovenko first tackle why Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is offering individual pay packages north of $200 million, poaching some of OpenAI’s top individual contributors. Yakovenko observes that it seems Meta is giving up on its open-source Llama project, their competitor to the models that underpin OpenAI and ChatGPT (he also comments that it seems that engineers at xAI are disappointed in the latest version of Grok). Overall, though the pay-packages of AI engineers and researchers are high; there is now a big shakeout as massive companies with the money and engineering researchers pull away from their competitors. Additionally, in terms of cutting-edge models, the US and China are the only two international players (Yakovenko notes parenthetically that Chinese engineers are also the primary labor base of American AI firms). They also discuss how it is notable that almost three years after the beginning of the current booming repeated hype-cycles of artificial intelligence began to crest, we are still no closer to “artificial general intelligence” and the “intelligence super-explosion” that Ray Kurzweil has been predicting for generations. AI is partially behind the rise of companies like Waymo that are on the verge of transforming the economy, but overall, even though AI is still casting around for its killer app, big-tech has fully bought in and believes that the next decade will determine who wins the future.