AI talent is getting recruited like celebrity athletes, but with no salary caps.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino. Big tech companies have been in an all-out bidding war to capture top AI researchers and engineers.

Companies like Meta have reportedly been offering compensation packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars,

in one case up to a billion dollars over several years.

They're the kind of eye-watering sums you usually only hear about in pro sports.

So we wanted to know, does this strategy of collecting expensive superstars usually pay off?

Well, when it comes to an all-star roster, there's one example in basketball that always comes up.

Join us now as we name the Dream Team, the United States team for Barcelona in 92.

The Dream Team is essentially probably the greatest team ever assembled.

David Berry is a sports economist at Southern Utah University.

And they go to the Olympics where nobody else has professional players,

and you have the greatest professional players ever.

Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley.

This was a lot of fun because we won every game by like 50 points.

The U.S. has defeated Croatia 117 to 85, and they have, as expected, won the gold here in Barcelona.

You assembled this phenomenal amount of talent, and it worked out exactly as you hoped it would.

That is unusual, Barry says.

Dream team like dominance is rare in professional sports.

Despite all the statistical analysis and big money contracts, it's still hard to buy your

way to wins, often because we misjudge what makes a player or an AI hot shot valuable.

Guess what? A star may be a star not just because they are fantastic in their work, but because

of the team around them.

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