Senate leaders can afford only two Republican defections in order to win passage through the narrowly divided chamber.

“Of course demand outweighs supply. And things are not getting better any time soon,”

The basic concepts of deep learning are not hard to grasp, requiring little more than high-school-level math.

In order to keep pace, smaller companies are looking for talent in unusual places.

Uber hired 40 people from Carnegie Mellon’s groundbreaking A.I. program in 2015 to work on its self-driving-car project.

By 2013, Google, Facebook and a few other companies started to recruit the relatively few researchers who specialized in these techniques.

The cutting edge of artificial intelligence research is based on a set of mathematical techniques called deep neural networks.

Last year, according to the company’s recently released annual financial accounts in Britain, the lab’s “staff costs” as it expanded to 400 employees totaled $138 million. That comes out to $345,000 an employee.

Most of all, there is a shortage of talent, and the big companies are trying to land as much of it as they can.

Salaries are spiraling so fast that some joke the tech industry needs a National Football League-style salary cap on A.I. specialists. “That would make things easier,” said Christopher Fernandez, one of Microsoft’s hiring managers. “A lot easier.”

Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them.

Now the tech industry’s race to embrace artificial intelligence may render that advantage moot — at least for the few prospective employees who know a lot about A.I.

Nearly all big tech companies have an artificial intelligence project, andthey are willing to pay experts millions of dollars to help get it done.