Conan can deliver a joke written by someone else such that it is at least as funny as the local stand-up comedian, almost every time. He just has to be funny enough to not miss more than two times in a row. The local can have off nights. The big name has to kill it at every show. The really big name has to kill it at every show, in front of cameras.

And it's not just that. Entertainers acquire a fan base. You cannot grow your earnings without engaging with and growing your fan base. You can make a seven-figure income as a celebrity entertainer when 300000 people are willing to throw $10 your way every year. (The other 2/3 goes to support staff and overhead.)

That's not a matter of shortage. It's a matter of competition. At a certain point, people cannot spare another moment to follow another person, and have exhausted their entertainment budgets. The top names aren't the best. They're the most reliable.

CEOs and bankers have an uncommon skill set, for business management and financial management, but they don't have anything that can't be easily replicated by people in the same business that want to move up into the higher-paid positions. Those high salaries are partially from prestige competition. The CEO of a 20000 person company doesn't necessarily have more skill than the CEO of a 2000 person company. The manager of a $1 billion fund isn't necessarily more skilled than the manager of a $10 million fund. They just work for people who can afford to pay more. Often, they just know more influential people, and were in the right place at the right time.

AI research, on the other hand, depends on some serious skill. While there are a lot of people out there that can write dumb programs, and fewer that can write programs that can handle every foreseeable situation, there are rare individuals that can write programs able to do things the programmer never anticipated. It's like a comedian that can write a superjoke that gets a laugh from everyone, every time, forever. Or a banker that can get 15% returns every year, without fail, for 50 years. Or a CEO that grows earnings by 3.5% every quarter, and always meets expectations. Building a robot that can catch a thrown ball is a feat of that magnitude. It's absolutely incredible that we have any people able to do that.

There are plenty of software developers out there that can move into AI if they had to, but it would take some time for them to get up to speed on the state of the art, and it would take entire teams of them to produce the same level of benefit as one current AI specialist. Companies that see a path to monetization for AI are looking to find and hire the Carmack of AI and get there first, rather than 100 people able to constantly surf behind that leading wave by about six months.

The shortage is temporary because software folks are good at following the smell of money. The shortage is overblown, because this research was already happening before the truckloads of money pulled up to the dock. It is not illusory, because the previous lack of funding for AI has produced relatively few experts. But it will probably turn into a glut later on, because the people offering the money will eventually learn that AI research can't be rushed in the manner to which they are accustomed, and will abandon all those they enticed into the field.