Top university graduates in math and computer science are landing starting pay packages worth up to a million dollars as AI companies and Wall Street trading firms fight over the same small group of specialists. The salary jump is being driven by trading firms shifting toward machine learning and large language models. That shift puts Wall Street in direct competition with AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which are all trying to hire from the same small group of experts. "The delineation is pre-OpenAI and post-OpenAI," Matt Stabile, founder of the recruitment firm Stabile Search, told The Wall Street Journal. The salary jump is being driven by trading firms shifting toward machine learning and large language models.