As entry-level job seekers stack on higher degrees to shield against the threat of AI, the CEO at one of the biggest social media companies says most AI engineers may not even need a prestigious degree to be seen as top talent.
Instead of having to obtain the highest form of education, Adam Mosseri, CEO and president of Instagram, said AI engineers have two things in common: they’re scrappy and quick learners.
“It’s people who are very quick learners who actively experiment,” Mosseri said on an episode of the Good Guys podcast hosted by Josh Peck and Ben Soffer.
Mosseri added that this new wave of AI talent looks very different from the traditional Silicon Valley engineer.
“It’s a much more scrappy type of engineer or researcher really than what most of the Valley has historically hired, which are much more like, ‘This is the right way to build a database that serves this many millions of people over this many data centers where there’s a right way to do it, where you could write a PhD about it.’”
“This is not that. There are PhDs about the research, for sure, who work in the research area, but the people who are doing the applied stuff—it’s a small group of people,” he added.
Mosseri said one of the main reasons why salaries have become inflated for seeking out the best AI talent is because it’s not something you could learn in school, because it’s so new.
“A lot of them are in their 20s,” he said. “It’s a bunch of techniques and technologies that are evolving very quickly,” he said.
Across Silicon Valley, the AI talent war has become white-hot in 2025. Tech giants like Meta reportedly offered pay packages to the tune of $100 million to recruit OpenAI employees.
Mosseri said that while the offers people may read are greatly exaggerated, they are still a lot of money, and there’s a tiny pool of people who can do cutting-edge AI model work.
“There’s an immense amount of competition to hire that talent, which is what’s driving up the cost of hiring these people,” Mosseri said. “Some of these techniques are decades old, but a lot of it is just brand-new and novel, and everyone is learning on the fly.”
Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old billionaire founder of Scale AI who is now leading superintelligence efforts at Meta, says “vibe-coding,” or using AI to generate and refine software code through natural language prompts, has massive potential for young coders. In his view, time spent hands-on with AI tools now could lead to a career-defining advantage later.
“When personal computers first came about, the people who spent the most time with it and grew up with it had this immense advantage in the future economy—like the Bill Gateses, even the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world,” the Gen Z cofounder said on the TBPN podcast. “I think that moment is happening right now.”