It's definitely not enough to be just an average "AI researcher" to get this treatment. This guy (Nathan Lambert) is from a top RL lab, with a strong RL publica

It's definitely not enough to be just an average "AI researcher" to get this treatment. This guy (Nathan Lambert) is from a top RL lab, with a strong RL publication record, an expert in RLHF, which is extremely hot right now, and with a recent experience creating RLHF pipelines at HuggingFace (one of the top AI companies). So he's probably in top-1% of all people looking for AI research jobs currently.