Not true. I've done SRED every year for the past ~7 years. It is work, but there are specialized consultants that do most of it. If the work is truly R&D (which would be the case for a cutting-edge AI company) and you track your work in JIRA or something like that, then it's mostly just writing a few pages describing the efforts.

10B$ says you're wrong.

10B is going to old mates mates.

No new startups are getting it.

It's also like pulling teeth trying to explain to people that if we don't offer compensation commensurate with what they get in the US people will just leave for the US.

There is some form of brain damage where even people who know how to code assume that because you can get a crud developer for $80k a year you should get an AI researcher for $150,000. It's nearly double after all.

Compensation isn’t just money. Staying near family and friends is hard to measure. I’ve never moved country for $ alone.

Great. But anyone good gets offered so much they move eventually.

It might not be a year after uni, might not be 10, but eventually they will move because the pay in the US is just so much better than anywhere else.

There is a vast underestimation of how tedious & time-intensive these tax credit programs are when applying for them. A large company can do so because they can hire the people to solely go after them; A new startup (with a headcount that can fit in one hand) is too busy in actually keeping the business alive to pursue these programs, which often times come with conditions too arbitrary for startups to fulfill.