I don't think that people are ranked by talent. This is also true for academia. You don't have to be more talented than the next guy to show better results acc

I don't think that people are ranked by talent. This is also true for academia. You don't have to be more talented than the next guy to show better results according to some metric. Right place + right time + avoid confrontations = a huge boost for your success. See http://data-mining.philippe-fournier-viger.com/too-many-machine-learning-papers/ http://data-mining.philippe-fournier-viger.com/too-many-mach... Roughly speaking, about 50k papers are published every year in arxiv/ML by perhaps 20k different researchers. Since some people still don't publish there, you may say there exists about 50k ML/AI/DL researchers. Say 5k of them are pushing the field forward, most of them have a PhD. The remaining 45k deliver various local optimizations/adaptations, many of them don't have a PhD. Now it depends on the size of your normal tech hub employer. If it is big, then you have a few people from 5k and many from 45k. Otherwise, a few people from 45k.