We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

Ireland is solid, especially for any sort of biotech/medical. Strong critical skills immigration path, good wages, pretty much every major company has a facility there (many rivaling the US sites in size), friendly and welcoming place. Housing is a bit of struggle, mainly for renters.

I made the leap this year. No regrets.

generic92034• 5 months ago

the Germans elected the AfD

On federal level they are still at about 25% without an option to come into power. It is bad, but it is not hopeless, yet.

readthenotes1• 5 months ago

Does that mean Europe will get a sustainable lead on irreproachable Science?

ronnier• 5 months ago

No. Europe is in decline. Asia will.

tensor5• 5 months ago

I think that depends on a lot of factors. E.g. will there be a turn around in the US, and if so how fast? Will Europe and other nations increase science funding to account for all the new talent that wants to come? Will that funding be permanent, not just a one time effort?

Also, if the US restores their democracy and also decides to value science again, will the salaries for scientists abroad compete enough to prevent scientists moving back.

To maintain a sustainable lead the money and investment has to be substantial and long term.

cogman102• 5 months ago

Europe isn't the one to watch, IMO. It's China. China has already significantly increased it's R&D funding and in some areas, particularly solar and battery tech, it's world leading.

China also has been playing the long game with the build out of it's technology capabilities. I could very easily see them doing the same for medicine. They aren't afraid of losing money on investment for a particularly long period of time. They are currently thinking in decades and not quarters.

xienze• 5 months ago

Also, if the US restores their democracy

We don’t have elections anymore? When did this happen?

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

No, the US still spends 5x what Europe does on biomedical research, measured as a percent of GDP.

tensor5• 5 months ago

For now. US science is still in decline. Major works by places like Moderna have been denied permission to continue, for example. You can't assume that funding will not continue to decrease at a rapid rate in the US.

seanmcdirmid2• 5 months ago

China is putting up the money, not Europe. Europe only gets a slice if they invest in it.

commandlinefan• 5 months ago

For all the recent hand-wringing about the U.S. becoming less welcoming to immigrants, the U.S. is still far, far ahead of any European country in terms of immigration opportunities. If you're qualified to come to anywhere in Europe, you were qualified to come to the United States years or decades ago.

tick_tock_tick3• 5 months ago

lol no it's Europe dude for the same reason they are lagging in everything they will lag in this why would you think otherwise.

On a more serious note any of the freedoms people are talking about disappearing in the USA were either already long gone or a decade further down the road of dying in Europe. Hell they are routinely jailing people for speech now.

Ericson2314• 5 months ago

Frankly, if the places that dominate at healthcare delivery efficiency also dominate at research, that could be good for the world.

The US having a dogshit healthcare delivery system but so much research means that good vertical integration is not possible.

Conversely a more integrated EU — continent scale welfare state — could do really interesting "integrated OpEx and CapEx" medical research in ways that are simply impossible in the US.

Remember the Danes making Ozempic is making something that is fundamentally far more useful for Americans than Danes (of course the money is good for Danes). Most non-American drug research today probably chases the lucrative American market, but ideally that would change.

shimman3• 5 months ago

You're making a lot of assumptions: that providers are healthcare providers, that providers want to provide more healthcare, or that providers are incentivized to pay for better healthcare.

I'm sure the system you want would exist if healthcare providers had one customer to worry about: the US government. I can't think of a single doctor, the ones that actually want to help people and not cash a phat check, that likes the current system of filling out paperwork or begging to do surgeries for patients from insurance companies.

Most actually want to just provide care.

Get rid of the middle man, get rid of the profit motive, and you'll get a system that society can actually shape.

KevinMS• 5 months ago

In the normal trajectory of a life in science, Morgan would be planning to set up his own laboratory conducting groundbreaking research designed to win the war on superbugs. But with an ongoing hiring freeze at NIH, his options are limited.

That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.

Retric• 5 months ago

Morgan (or someone else)

The hiring freeze stops everyone not just that one specific person. A 4 year pause on new researchers is meaningful even if this specific person wasn’t going to start a lab.

Avicebron• 5 months ago

True. Morgan could also end up running pipettes and 96-well plates in Foster City for $45000/yr.

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

Well, he might be planning to set up a lab. Probably wouldn't, though, statistically.

idoubtit• 5 months ago

That seems a bit too optimistic to be a valid argument.

I think you misunderstood, since that's not about optimism. Years ago, smart students from all over the world could hope for a successful career in American research. Now, in the USA many doors are closing in most academic domains, and few (potential) researchers dare plan any success story.

jorblumesea• 5 months ago

It's not surprising. smart, educated people are a direct threat to the current administration and in general the US right has had academia in its sights for awhile. Ultimately it's bad for the country but how the US has been trending. Similarly, US education funding and the content of it has been politicized and it's producing a negative feedback loop.

Political goals and what's good for the average person are completely disconnected at this point.

reenorap• 5 months ago

I think the US draining other countries of their best and brightest is why many countries have been left behind in terms of economic development.

Other countries need to take up the mantle of research and they can't do that if all of them go to the US. I think this is overall good for the rest of the world, because relying on the US and the sociopathic companies that exploit public research for personal gain is bad for the entire world.

zaptheimpaler2• 5 months ago

Yes, Canada has already seen a large uptick in researchers and doctors coming in from the US and other countries have too. It's good for everybody for research to be more decentralized so that it can better withstand shocks in single countries.

nubinetwork• 5 months ago

I had to find a new doctor recently, and the temporary one that was assigned to me was a guy from Texas... he said he came here because they didn't have room for him and he heard we needed the doctors. Why Canada over any other US state? Hard to say, but I'm not going to complain.

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

This kind of Level 1 analysis misses what is really going on. "Brain drain" is not really a concern.

There is a tremendous glut of talented biomedical researchers. We have been overproducing them for decades. Even before the cuts, it was incredibly hard to go from a PhD to a tenured professorship. 5-15% would achieve that, depending how you measured.

The cuts have made things worse, but European/RoW funding is even stingier. It's not like there's a firehose of funding drawing away researchers. There may be a few high-profile departures, but the US is still the least-bad place to find research money.

We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.

tensor5• 5 months ago

This kind of analysis isn't much better. First, many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).

Secondly, it's about more than funding. The US is also no longer safe for a great many of the scientists that would normally choose come to the US to work. And even for those that aren't too worried about ICE, scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal. The US has suddenly become a very undesirable place to live if you value these things.

Third, scientific freedom is under attack in the US. And there is nothing scientists value more than the freedom to pursue their research.

My take is that most Americans can't imagine a world where they are not number one. But that is a very naive idea.

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/innovation-science-economic-develop...

b65e8bee43c2ed0• 5 months ago

scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal

two election results in the past ten years have apparently failed to teach y'all wholesome folx that many people around you are secretly unwholesome.

roger110• 5 months ago

I've heard more than 0 people complaining that it's not safe, but not a whole lot. And not the productive people either. Also, unfortunately the same opinions that get you in trouble in the US will get you in trouble in western Europe. I'm not saying it's right, just that it doesn't seem to be actually draining brains.

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

many countries are increasing funding substantially (e.g. [1]).

This illustrates exactly my point. Canada is planning on spending up to CAD$1.7B over 12 years. That is equivalent to USD$100M per year, or 0.3% of the NIH 2026 budget. Maybe if Europe does something similar they can get to 2%!

The US is also no longer safe

I agree that Trump's regime has made the US a less welcoming place for foreign scientists, and that budget cuts mean less research will be done. What I disagree with is the idea that "brain drain" is a significant threat to US science. We simply have such an incredible oversupply of biomed PhDs that we should welcome the prospect of other countries absorbing the supply.

juniperus2• 5 months ago

it's all about funding. for every 1 person nervous about intellectual safety in the US, there are 50–100 waiting to fill that spot, if not 1,000–10,000. Funding has been cut in academia, and less positions are available as a result. No country is remarkably filling this gap, aside from a hilariously few more availabilities and some more graduate student positions (who operate as the scientific labor in Europe and other countries, before graduating and having to come to the US for job opportunity).

As others have pointed out, presumably the outcome is that higher value scientists are favored, and higher impact research is demanded. When industry demands certain research, the funding appears because private entities will fund those positions and those grants. The widespread funding of all avenues of science is a great feature of American intellectual culture and hopefully it doesn't vanish. But it was a remarkably uneconomical arrangement and a total aberration of history, so I wouldn't hold my breath about it sticking around through the tides of history, it was more of a fluke, and many in academia wishing to regenerate that fluke are a bit delusional and a bit tied to the idea of a golden era like the boomers dreaming of the 1950s suburbs. A great deal of research is important science, but totally worthless for the foreseeable future on an economic basis. We might not yet conceive of why this research does have economic value, but it's so abstracted that as it stands, the value isn't tangible and it's thus impossible to defend reasonably.

Scientific freedom doesn't mean the freedom to expect a subsidized career on the basis of non-lucrative research. It's more of a privilege to have such a lifestyle that is downstream of a wealthy empire. Since America is going bankrupt, the dollar-reaper is coming for the superfluous. So, there goes your funding for conure breeding or the health benefits of community gardens and expect more stability if you're researching crop diseases or livestock vector research.

tick_tock_tick3• 5 months ago

scientists tend to be very liberal and value freedom and democracy a great deal

What is the alternative? Canada and Europe don't even have free speech.

radioactivist• 5 months ago

While I echo some of your points, [1] is bad example (as a Canadian).

Research money in Canada is harder to come by; a basic research grant is roughly ~5x-10x lower than a comparable American grant (students are cheaper here, so its not completely proportional, but equipment, travel, etc doesn't scale).

The example for money for poaching international researchers also comes with the asterisk that while they found ~$2B for this, they also are cutting the base funding of the federal granting agencies by a few percent at the same time, atop of that funding being anemic for decades at this point. A big "fuck you" to the Canadian research community in my opinion.

mtsr• 5 months ago

You are forgetting that tenured researchers often need lots of PhD students to actually do their research. So that ratio of 8 PhDs to a tenured researchers could actually be pretty good.

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

Pretty good for the professor, not so good for the students.

jltsiren• 5 months ago

That's a result of the funding model focused on small competitive grants. You could probably get at least as good research with a funding model that replaces every three PhD students with a student and a staff scientist. But then the society would have fewer PhDs overall, which would have unpredictable consequences.

141205• 5 months ago

You would forget that this would cause exponential growth: in a couple decades, a single lab could produce more people seeking tenure track than an entire country's worth of positions; there need to be smarter ways to provide the requisite labor for science, since this is clearly unsustainable praxis. Running a pyramid scheme of this magnitude is only going to cause an implosion—which we may already be witnessing.

lukev• 5 months ago

Set aside the question of how we might implement this (which I grant is complex and path-dependent)... but imagine if 5% of the wealth of every US billionaire were instead allocated to research and development.

Ultimately I don't think even the billionaires would be unhappy.

darth_avocado• 5 months ago

While I agree, US is still the top destination for research, I don’t agree with “Brain Drain is not a concern” nor do I agree with “We need fewer PhDs”. The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return. Pretty much all AI startups at the moment are coming from and being built by PhDs. The pace of innovation slows down and it can have huge long term economic impact. Having fewer PHDs also exacerbates that problem. If fewer people are looking for funding in the first place, you’d have even fewer ideas that could end up contributing meaningfully to society. The only solution to funding problems is more funding.

ProjectArcturis8• 5 months ago

The real risk of drain is people leaving their fields of expertise to never return.

That is happening right now, all the time! Especially in the biomed field! Many, many PhDs spend 5-8 years getting their degree and receiving minimal pay, then 4+ years being nomadic postdocs, also making terrible money, only to eventually arrive at the end of the road and realize they have to do something completely different.

It is unsustainable for every professor to train 10 PhDs in their career, because there aren't going to be 10 professorships (or even 3) for those PhDs to fill. Funding has to grow at the same exponential rate as the number of researchers. It did, from roughly 1950s to 1980s, as the university system expanded to accommodate the Boomer generation. It has slowed since, and the PhD to professorship pipeline got longer and leakier. It's doing a tremendous disservice to the bright, well-intentioned young people who join PhD programs.

janalsncm3• 5 months ago

Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them? At least from what the article mentions, figuring out new and better ways to fight diseases seems like one of the most important problems a human could be working on. In my mind the solution is to provide funding and fix the funding process, not produce fewer scientists.

Also, those scientists already exist. If the US decides not to fund them, they will go produce patents and grow the economies of other places. Many countries wish they could attract the talent that the US does.

iugtmkbdfil8345• 5 months ago

<< Why does the fact that there isn’t enough funding for the PhDs that exist imply we should produce fewer of them?

In most of the world, most humans have to move within the realm of available resources. One could easily say that if a manager of US sees too many PhDs, it is natural to conclude that since there is not enough resources to go around, adding more resource consumers is silly. We can argue all over whether it is a good policy, or whether the allocation makes sense, or whether the resources are really not there, but, how is is this a difficult logic gate?

pks016• 5 months ago

One can dream. Capitalist society would never reduce their PhD slaves. Saying this as someone who's closer to finishing PhD.

Xeronate• 5 months ago

Purely anecdotal, but my friend's dad was a professor at well respected university in California doing Cancer research and recently moved to China even though he didn't want to because the money was too much for him to pass up.

eunos5• 5 months ago

We need to produce fewer PhDs and provide better support for those we do produce.

You'll have gluts of Masters then and so on.

ikrenji3• 5 months ago

why produce less PhDs instead of fixing funding? in what world does the pentagon need 1 trillion dollars while NIH gets 10 billy or so?

tehjoker2• 5 months ago

I understand that the government is now too coarse to use soft power, and maybe it wasn't even working as well as it used to, but it is bizarre to undercut the sciences when their military capability is derived almost entirely from high technology since they can't field or lose lots of soldiers. I get they want to be Rome 3.0 or some bullshit, but Rome was famous for investing in engineering.

A bunch of dunces.

Or perhaps they are so far up their own assholes that they think AI is going to do research by itself with no funding from now on.

Ironically enough, the guy that coined the term "soft power" recently died. He did his doctorate with Henry Kissinger.

zaptheimpaler2• 5 months ago

They're happy to fund the military, they have a list of words [1][2] that they use to flag grant applications, including "female", "bias", "political" and others. Cuts seem to be directed at biomedicine, health and social studies.

[1] https://grant-witness.us/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/07/us/trump-fede...

tehjoker2• 5 months ago

That's true, I've seen it in action, but at the same time... the number of grants and the rate of grant issuance has been very slow. They aren't using a scalpel to eliminate all the "woke".

They are also attacking Harvard, the number 1 science university in the US. There's a scandal at Harvard last month where the Dean of Science was fired because he was protesting against eliminating graduate students in the sciences (they eventually settled for something like firing him and 50% cuts to my knowledge). I have no love for Harvard by the way, I never thought I would be defending them.

beloch• 5 months ago

"Billions of dollars have been wiped from research budgets, almost 8,000 grants have been cancelled at NIH and the US National Science Foundation alone, and more than 1,000 NIH employees have been fired."

----------------

Scientists go where science is funded. A large proportion of U.S. scientists are also immigrants, who will tend to go where immigrants are welcomed.

inglor_cz4• 5 months ago

Not everything is about money. The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.

China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.

Their cultural insularity does not help either. You can live in China, but you will never be accepted as Chinese. The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.

dheera• 5 months ago

Not everything is about money.

It is when researchers can't make enough money to eat and live, which is an actual reality in the US right now.

Researchers at top institutions often make less than Uber drivers.

There are other countries where you can live on less and the government isn't dipping their hands into your pockets every 5 seconds.

dylan6043• 5 months ago

The US was quite unique

Well, based on the current admin and supporters, only part of the US was unique

mulmen3• 5 months ago

China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.

I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.

cyanydeez• 5 months ago

America is hostile to science and technology. I'm not sure how anyone with a functional desire to improve humanity decides "Hey, those americans, they sure do deserve better vaccines."

mikestorrent2• 5 months ago

Well, perhaps it is time for large, ethnically-homogenous countries that are on the ascent to adopt diversity policies of the sort that the US was approaching before the "vibe shift"

michaelteter• 5 months ago

Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?

Are you also implying that in the US anyone is free to speak negatively of “dear leader”?

There are a multitude of current examples to the contrary.

Cyph0n2• 5 months ago

Just to add one more point that makes the US attractive to global talent: citizenship. In particular: 1) citizenship at birth and 2) viable path to citizenship via green card.

Of course, both of these are in the crosshairs for “revision”.

dragonwriter• 5 months ago

The killer app of the US used to be that the US was rich and welcoming to foreigners and politically quite free.

Yeah, it used to be the that the US only committed ethnic cleansing against people that were here first, not foreigners, and was so welcoming to foreigners that it would expend resources to have them shipped here as property.

deaux7• 5 months ago

The US was quite unique (together with Canada, Australia etc.) that it was able and willing to accept you as an American even with a funny accent, as long as you wanted to be one.

Very select parts of the US. Would've thought that the last 9 years taught you that for huge swathes of it, this was never true.

eunos5• 5 months ago

US State Department already asked for social media accounts. Chinese visa applications dont.

ljsprague4• 5 months ago

They sound like very loyal people who I would love to have as my compatriots.

Natfan2• 5 months ago

they can't be your compatriots if you imprison them, nor if they've to death due to working without any funding, also know as "pay"

kettlecorn• 5 months ago

Many of the world's most intelligent and caring people are loyal to values over tribe.

kg• 5 months ago

Loyalty is earned. They don't owe me or you any loyalty if we mistreat them.

e403• 5 months ago

Meanwhile, China has "genius camps" for young people, to skim off the cream of the cream of the crop, so they can go on to do amazing things for their country. It blows my mind what we've done in the last year, to damage our ability to compete on the world stage.

Arainach• 5 months ago

It bears repeating: for everyone who insists that the US Executive Branch isn't compromised by our enemies, what different actions would someone who was compromised and trying to speedrun the destruction of American power, influence, and hegemony have taken?

jimbokun5• 5 months ago

In the US education for talented students is under attack from the left as well as the right (just in different ways).

ei8ths• 5 months ago

have you seen our school systems, k12. Its terrible and in dire need of a revamp. No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings. Made schools better, have alternative paths for kids that are not excelling like some of their peers and find school hard to sit through.

jmcgough2• 5 months ago

It's really not about this - it's that for decades we've been able to draw top global talent to the US. We've cut research funding so heavy that we can't even support post docs who are American citizens now. My friends are going to Europe, Canada, Hong Kong.

rayiner14• 5 months ago

No child left behind really screwed kids over that want to learn. We cant just let kids pass because of feelings

The whole point of no child left behind was to actually measure student performance instead of relying on feelings: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...

If you try to disaggregate the effects of e.g. immigration, you can see that American education is actually good: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/18bzkle/2022_pi....

White students in the U.S. do comparably to students in Korea in the international PISA test, and better than students from western europe (excluding the immigrants in those countries).

You have to compare like with like. A huge fraction of American kids grow up to parents who are not native speakers of English. That’s not true in Japan or Korea.

brightball• 5 months ago

Don’t forget campaigning to remove standardized testing from admissions processes even leading to UCSD having to create remedial math classes for their engineering students.

specialist2• 5 months ago

Yes and: USA has been reverting education to its pre-Sputnik arrangement since the end of the Cold War. Without an external motivation, our domestic reactionaries have regained the advantage. Its been a generations long fight to roll back the New Deal (including public and hogher education). I have no clue if / when the pendullum will swing back.

crystal_revenge• 5 months ago

Scientists go where science is funded.

DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic pay quite well for research and have better "labs" than most places on Earth. I don't believe they're struggling to hire either.

This article is using a relatively outdated definition, functionally speaking, of "research institute".

Traditional research institutions, especially academia, have been declining for decades and current funding problems are just another one of many problems thrown into the mix.

I remember well a world where most serious research happened in universities and was publicly funded. I personally think that was a better world, but that is not the world we live in today and I don't see us going back. Even China's most impressive research is not coming from publicly controlled research institutes or universities but from VCs and large corporations.

To be fair, the time of open public science was a relatively brief in it's long history.

renjimen• 5 months ago

For every scientific discipline that is well represented across modern corporate labs there are a dozen that are not. Most "serious" research is not directly connected to making money.

raffael_de• 5 months ago

What country is it attracting then?

Mars008• 5 months ago

It's hard to tell. The Guardian is UK based, but for some reason the use word 'we'.

But actually China and India may be retracting some of their talents back. Unlikely many go back to EU/UK socialism.

Joel_Mckay2• 5 months ago

Anywhere else is a low-bar... probably shouldn't go searching for it =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdVB-R6Duso

agumonkey• 5 months ago

It's also repelling their own citizen. Lots of videos of people being fed up with the ambient angst in the US any time they come back from another country.

roughly3• 5 months ago

This is a thing that you don’t notice until you experience it. No more compelling argument that we’re doing something wrong as a nation than that first time stepping onto an American street after visiting a civilized country.

robk• 5 months ago

I live in a civilized European country and gravely miss the freedom of speech I had in the USA that I don't here. I'm terrified one tweet will get me jailed for 30 months.

gonzobonzo• 5 months ago

True, after you visit a country where the cities are entirely safe and there aren't really any bad parts, it's disheartening to return to American cities where people say: "It's really safe! Just ignore these areas, don't go out late out night, keep an eye out when you walk around, and just ignore the crazy people yelling threats at you, they probably won't do anything."

Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.

wewewedxfgdf• 5 months ago

It's incredibly inexpensive for countries to import that top talent into their own universities. But governments just don't see the value, for the most part.

jeffbee• 5 months ago

It is not a "brain drain" when you declare war on science and fire all of your scientists. There must be some other phrase for that.

pesus• 5 months ago

Brain flush?

layer82• 5 months ago

Brainwashing? ;)

SanjayMehta• 5 months ago

Brain douche.

lgleason• 5 months ago

If you create an economic incentive to go into math an science you will have no trouble attracting good people. But, for years, it has been a race to the bottom where the US over-produced researchers, scientists etc.. But then to put salt in the wound it also imported more of them to drive the wages down further. As more people have flooded in to STEM at bargain basement prices, the quality of the research has also gone down.

All of this was by design so that big corporate interests could get cheap labor and increase profits. Since the US government is for sale to the highest bidder, and the corporations have no loyalty to the country, they will feed off the host until it can no longer sustain itself and then look for another host to feed off of.

pitched6• 5 months ago

This is the most interesting part of the way the US government is structured. Where the federal government has very little power compared to the states, each state is competing for talent. Like how Texas is more conservative and California is more liberal. May the best policies win. People will move to whichever set of laws better produces success. I don’t think that as true as it once was though.

servo_sausage• 5 months ago

I don't think it works out in practice; people voted based on identity but move based on economics.

And identity is mostly upbringing... You don't get mostly neutral people moving around to the best system, you get opinionated people trying to bring their preferred system to the better opportunity.

lvl155• 5 months ago

I am pretty sure we are still attracting top talents. We are not, however, attracting good to mediocre talents. Is that a good thing? What’s going to happen to all these mediocre graduate programs spread out all over the country where they simply existed to satiate foreign demand?

xiphias23• 5 months ago

USA is still one of the top countries for scientists. Just as an example Europe had a few years of exporting the best GLP-1 drugs (finally something in which Europe was leader in science), Eli Lily quickly took it over.

In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research: even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA.

Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.

USA politics is looked at so closely, because it matters and changes and still more democratic than most countries in the world even though democracy is a mess (as it's supposed to be).

nerevarthelame• 5 months ago

Terrence Tao expressed sentiments are at odds with you and which align with the article:

The U.S. used to be sort of the default, the no brainer, option. If you got an offer from a top U.S. university, this was like almost the best thing that could happen to you as an academic ... If it's just a less welcoming, atmosphere for science in general here, the best and brightest may not automatically come to the US as they have for decades.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skWt_PZosik

xiphias23• 5 months ago

Not really, one is complaining, the other (which the article's title says) is voting with their feet. He could have gone to literally any country/university in the world and he chose not to.

Also in the USA you just wait 4 (or 8) years and you have a new president. In many other countries you don't have that luxury.

oytis4• 5 months ago

He has a point, but there are no obvious alternatives. It's still a long way towards fascism for USA to actually lose its attractiveness, and it's not that other countries are getting more democratic either

flawn• 5 months ago

A more lengthy article about his resentment against the government: https://newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-award-winning-math...

testfrequency• 5 months ago

I find the Peter mention funny because some of the other reasons he said it made sense to move to SF were that labor laws in Europe wouldn’t allow him to work 6-7 days a week, and he’d have to focus more on safety/responsibility in mind in Europe.

He’s moving from London after all, arguably the global AI research hub.

(Also likely SA told him the offer was contingent on him relocating)

xiphias23• 5 months ago

I have never had problem working (and seeing other people work) 6-7 days a week in reality in Europe (even if it was unofficial).

But capital structures and politicians are still too close to old European companies from the second world war and don't allow venture capital to florish.

It's easier to earn money by winning a fake EU tender and giving back half of the money to a politician than doing something innovative.

hermanzegerman3• 5 months ago

Nobody would stop him from working 6-7 days a week. Only for forcing his employees to do this involuntarily for him.

direwolf203• 5 months ago

There are no work police in Europe who go round every workplace to make you log your hours working and arrest you if it's over 40.

noosphr2• 5 months ago

In software San Francisco is still the top for AI research

What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.

Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.

The US is in the position it was for semiconductor manufacturing, first it was labs and open science. Then by the 80s fabs started costing millions and universities stopped being able to contribute and nothing got published.

Now it's getting to trillions and if Intel goes under there is no one in the US who knows how to make any semiconductor generation newer than 2010.

tr4477• 5 months ago

What was the last thing that a major US Lab published? It's all trade secrets.
Chinese labs are the only ones publishing results as they happen.

Google published the transformer architecture. Facebook published llama.

hermanzegerman3• 5 months ago

I'm not sure how making a copycat "me-too" drug, after one was successfully developed shows how innovative a country or company is?

jimmymcgee73• 5 months ago

You realize semaglutide wasn’t the first GLP-1 right?

The first GLP-1 was exenatide, invented in America and released in collaboration with Eli Lilly.

In addition tirzepatide and retatrutide are not “just” GLP-1s. You frankly do not know what you are talking about.

tzs2• 5 months ago

Just as an example Europe had a few years of exporting the best GLP-1 drugs (finally something in which Europe was leader in science), Eli Lily quickly took it over

You make it sound like Europe was not a leader in any area of science until this one thing which they led in for a few years.

Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company

No, he's an example of what can happen when a Fields medalist gets funding cut. 99% of exceptionally smart university mathematicians and scientists will not be able to get VC money.

With the US both cutting research funding and becoming unfriendly to foreign students many future Tao's that would have chosen a US school for grad school will likely look elsewhere.

jmward01• 5 months ago

I fled SF and I know a bunch of similar people. Startups are still founded there for the address, not the local talent pool. The address is there because of inertia, not because of inherent advantage. If I were to create a startup I wouldn't even consider doing it in SF now. It is a waste of money that could be put towards the idea. The US is clearly on an ant-intellectual path. People default to here because of inertia but every attack on immigrants, every high level decision based on quack science and personal gain and every attack on our institutions supporting the development of the next generation is putting inertia elsewhere. It is clear as day that the US is only keeping any kind of advantage right now due to inertia and threat and not innovation and effort.

msy2• 5 months ago

This is a lagging indicator, it is still one of the top no question, but the point is that is shifting materially.

runako• 5 months ago

even when Peter Steinberger didn't know what he will do with OpenClaw, it was clear to him that the only place to move to was USA

We don't know how much OpenAI offered him, but I would bet big that it was enough to get most people to relocate across country lines. [To level-set: we know Meta was offering $100m pay packages to researchers who had not already released something like OpenClaw.]

mmooss• 5 months ago

Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.

That is the intent of these government policies: Shift power and resources to powerful, wealthy private individuals (and their companies). Is Tao doing research?

viking1232• 5 months ago

I have visited USA but I never liked it enough to want to live there due to the culture being too extroverted for me. I moved to Singapore and like it a lot.

I don't think USA is a bad place, probably the best for your career but I don't see myself enjoying living there too much, although maybe I am generalizing because I only visited New York and SF.

vortegne• 5 months ago

I'm sorry, but LLM startups isn't science, it's the current gold rush. As impactful LLM stuff might or might not be in the future, it's just the current startup cash chase cycle.

Dodging work regulations is also not really "attracting talent". SF is an insane bubble and views itself as a much more intelletually important than it actually is.

gunnihinn• 5 months ago

Terrence Tao was a good example of what happens when an exceptionally smart person stops getting funded by an American University: not moving to another country, but got VC money and created a new company.

What company did Tao fund with VC money?

dlev_pika• 5 months ago

Meanwhile I’ve been getting Migrate to Canada ads in my IG feed…

te_chris• 5 months ago

Nationalists are all the same and all hate the country as it is vs how they imagine it to be - see the uk brexiters ignoring science and the creative industries.

Most of all they hate intelligent people as they see their schemes for what they are.

panny• 5 months ago

As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world.

Oh no. We might lose the largest most expensive medical system in the world. I would sure hate to have an affordable lightweight medical system. I mean, aren't we doomed if we can't spend another five trillion dollars on a covid shot. Think of the poor pharma companies.

lateforwork2• 5 months ago

In all important areas such as clean energy, fusion energy, biotechnology and AI the Chinese government is heavily investing in and pushing Chinese companies to lead the world.

China Is Outspending the U.S. to Achieve the ‘Holy Grail’ of Clean Energy: Fusion See: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/climate/china-us-fusion-e...

America's lead in biotechnology is slipping, while China has made synthetic biology a national priority. In the iGEM international competition, only one American school finished in top 10, seven were from China. See: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-may-have-come-up-with-new... Or watch video: https://youtu.be/VEj5I4CBbgU

mr_00ff003• 5 months ago

But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent?

I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent. The US still has that advantage even if it has less of it, unless I am mistaken.

conception• 5 months ago

Well, China has a tremendous pool of people to pull talent from. Do they need immigrants? Or just continue the path of “building it in-house”?

lateforwork2• 5 months ago

China is trying. Around the time the US announced restrictions on the H-1B visa, China announced the K visa for attracting immigrants [1].

At this point in time, I don't think people are lining up to get K visa to go live in China. But if the current trajectory continues in the US, who knows how things will be in 5 years?

[1] https://www.china-briefing.com/news/chinas-entry-exit-k-visa...

ggregoire• 5 months ago

I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

Learning mandarin is the major blocker imo, more people would move if the language was easier.

rayiner14• 5 months ago

The importance of immigrant “talent” is clearly overstated. Japan became a powerhouse in the 20th century with virtually no immigration and a significantly smaller population than the US. China is becoming a technological powerhouse with no immigration as well.

jjmarr3• 5 months ago

Chinese is too difficult of a language.

I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.

Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.

Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.

Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.

You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.

Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.

Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.

drecked• 5 months ago

If the U.S. is losing talent to anywhere else in the world isn’t it losing a relative advantage or increasing a relative disadvantage with China, even if China is not the one benefiting from the lost talent?

msy2• 5 months ago

They're to migrating to America any more either, that's the point. So no, the US has no advantage, on current trajectory it'll increasingly only have 'native' talent and some of that may choose to move elsewhere.

helterskelter3• 5 months ago

If they succeed, it’s purely with their own talent.

I wouldn't go that far, Chinese espionage is a very real thing, with industry secrets being some of the top targets.

foxglacier5• 5 months ago

China doesn't need those other people because Chinese people are naturally smarter than them, generally. If that idea makes you uncomfortable, just look at the data and you'll agree.

gambiting3• 5 months ago

>I don’t think people all over Europe/Asia/Africa migrate to China.

All over? No. But I know several software engineers who went to China to work in tech and they can't stop raving about how good they have it there - one came back to work for a US company(remotely from his EU country) and is now desperate to find some more work in China again, he liked it that much. The language barrier is a problem sure, but then again I also know software engineers who went to work in Germany and after years they don't speak a lick of German. It's not an insurmountable problem.

rstuart4133• 5 months ago

But related to this article, is China winning in terms of accumulating talent?

You can ask Google for metrics:

- China produces about over 1.3 to 1.6 million new engineering graduates per year.

- The USA produces about 130,000–200,000, or about 1/10 of China, but has a population of about 1/4.

- Europe is hard to measure, but USA plus Europe combined is almost certainly less than China by a significant margin.

tsoukase• 5 months ago

China doesn't want as a prime goal to become world leader. They just want to expand their infrastructure, science, production, everything for their own prosperity. If there is no other competitor left, then world leadership will be a by product. They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal (see military presence, coups and secret diplomatic deals in foreign countries that the US was doing after WWII in order to remain at the top by all means). They don't want (until now) to spread their culture worldwide (see language, movies, video games etc) due to the language difficulty. They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.

mschuster912• 5 months ago

They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal

Oh hell yes they do. Chinese overfishing is wreaking havoc across the planet [1], not just near Asia, but the reach of Chinese fishing fleets goes as far as Africa and South America. In the case of Africa, this has been one of the contributing causes for people to flee to Europe.

Then you got the stealing. America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level.

And finally, you got artificial subsidies. Solar, batteries, cars - the CCP is engaged in insane pricing wars backed by practically infinite funds. They already managed to "outcompete" most solar production and are on their best way to screw up our automotive industries as well.

They do want to expand their productive capacity by financing projects in foreign countries, but in a business-as-usual way not in a I-am-the-boss way.

Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/chinas-rampant-illegal-fishing-enda...

[2] https://www.news24.com/business/china-puts-aggressive-terms-...

LunaSea• 5 months ago

They don't suppress foreign countries for that goal

They are just pacifically planning on invading Taiwan at the moment.

They also install secret police stations in foreign countries to chase and pressure Chinese citizens or people of Chinese decent into doing their bidding.

Herring3• 5 months ago

Hurting yourself to hurt others is a well-established political practice in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diversity_in_swimming

claudeomusic• 5 months ago

But we’re great now I thought?

newfriend• 5 months ago

For an American startup/technology forum, this place is remarkably anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-AI, anti-crypto.

deaux7• 5 months ago

Gee, wonder what caused that change over the last decade. Really can't think of a reason.

And just in case you truly believe it's something like "Russian bots" - and I hope you don't - you need to check out the change in the bigger public's opinion on big tech companies, and why it has changed. It's far from just HN.

lugu2• 5 months ago

I would say quite the opposite. Have you considered the position of the general population in your assessment?

ozgrakkurt• 5 months ago

I don’t think many educated and working class people are pro- those things at this time

alistairSH• 5 months ago

There’s a massive difference between being patriotic and being pro-Meta or pro-Google. And given recent bribes from tech leaders to Trump, I’d argue being anti-BigTech is actually patriotic.

mjcohen• 5 months ago

Trump is clearly winning his war on America.

shynome• 5 months ago

now chinese know kill line in us, chinese will not go to us again.

dash23• 5 months ago

The article provides absolutely no data to support any claims of a brain drain away from America, towards Europe or anywhere else. You’d think they would have found evidence if there was any. So after reading this, my prior on substantial numbers of researchers moving to Europe has gone down.

There is an obvious plausible reason why there might not be much brain drain to Europe: salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.

Academics love to believe they don’t care about money, and Guardian readers love to believe that the US is doomed by its moral failings. I’ll believe both those things when I see evidence for them.

frm88• 5 months ago

The article provides absolutely no data to support any claims of a brain drain away from America, towards Europe or anywhere else.

There are no actual numbers for emigree PhDs. Government losses across all agencies are some 10900 scientists [0] or ~14%. Whether they retire, emigrate or no longer do science doesn't matter for the outcome.

[0]https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-government-has-l...

dash23• 5 months ago

... It matters for Europe! Also, do we know they aren't still in the US university system doing science?

pvaldes• 5 months ago

You’d think they would have found evidence if there was any.

Maybe somebody closed all public scientific databases, all government science webs, and harassed or fired thousands of scientists. That would explain the lack of public scientific data.

salaries are much lower there, because Europe is poorer.

Salaries are just a number and should be always taken in the context of coast of living. Europe is diverse, with poor places and rich places. You can live like a king with a worse salary in many places. In the more expensive ones you will pay more taxes, but receive more services in exchange. You will enjoy 30 days of paid holidays a year, and a very diverse continent to roam free on that time. You will enjoy also universal healthcare, affordable groceries, a near to zero expectation of your children being murdered at the school, and much more options to choose a political party that suits your own interests if you don't like the current situation.

Europe has many problems and lots of idiomatic and cultural walls, of course; but at this moment US just looks like a terrible place to live or even visit. The government is purposely doing all that they can to fleece every citizen and burn down the entire place.

dash23• 5 months ago

Again, do you have any evidence, from any source - European or American, government or other - that academics are moving to Europe from the US in greater numbers than before?

dyauspitr• 5 months ago

It’s less brain drain and more brain blockades. For now smart people still want to come here. We have to end our insane policy of preventing them from doing so.

niemandhier3• 5 months ago

I keep meeting Stanford grads that interview for jobs in Germany, most are women or non-Caucasian.

Germany is not even an attractive country to work in at the moment, so I assume it’s even more pronounced elsewhere.

randomNumber7• 5 months ago

I think it's not that simple. If science comes to the conclusion that there are 36 human genders the top talent might also look for s.th. more sane.

smashah• 5 months ago

Well deserved.

dennysora• 5 months ago

I’ve heard that, at companies developing AI right now, the core R&D staff are mostly ethnic Chinese. I’m not sure whether that’s accurate.

I’ve also heard that meetings are conducted in English, but that all private discussions happen in Chinese, so managers have no idea what they’re talking about.

That said, Chinese really is hard… In contrast, English is simple enough, so it’s more efficient to learn, and it’s easier to attract talent.

As for whether this “stifles” anything, I think China mainly relies on its own people. Most of the talent who go to China still speak English anyway.

On top of that, China’s speech control is genuinely annoying. Though I also find it annoying that Threads arbitrarily suppresses speech, too.

In areas like energy, semiconductors (Taiwan—although some production/deployment is currently in China, but it’s hard to say what might happen and when), and AI, China does feel unsettlingly powerful right now.

In democratic countries, just getting approval for a new energy facility can turn into years of arguing; in China, they can build several in the same time.

By the way, I’m Taiwanese.

_DeadFred_• 5 months ago

In the 1990s we used to build great talent out of randos from other industries. It was why we used to white board tests, to see who had the right logic capabilities to be trained up in computer programming.

metalman• 5 months ago

America had the best talent, because they grew there own, from the best educated and funded research institutions and paid them well, and there were many large companys founded and run by engineers and scientists. Also they educated foriegn students, the brightest of the bright who were happy to stay and contribute as it was by far the best personal option to stay and enjoy the results of high tech society, safe, clean, prosperous......sane. Now there are more better options everywhere else, and as america is very strongly tilted towards maximum profit at any cost to society,so they are getting a lot of people comming who think thats great, and have lots of ideas and energy to put into maximising the money, now, right this very second, more money!,aaaaaand now,more!

We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science

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