AUSTIN, Texas — In the brave new world of artificial intelligence, talent is the new gold, and companies are in a frantic race to find it. While universities work to churn out computer science graduates, a new kind of school has emerged in Austin to meet the insatiable demand: Gauntlet AI.

Gauntlet AI bills itself as an elite training program. It’s a high-stakes, high-reward process designed to forge “AI-first” engineers and builders in a matter of weeks.

“We’re closer to Navy SEAL bootcamp training than a school,” said Ash Tilawat, Head of Product and Learning. “We take the smartest people in the world. We bring them into the same place for a 1000 hours over ten weeks and we make them go all in with building with AI.”

Austen Allred, the co-founder and CEO of Gauntlet AI, says when they claim to be looking for the smartest engineers in the world, it’s no exaggeration. The selection process is intensely rigorous.

“We accept around 2 percent of the applicants,” Allred explained. “We accept 98th percentile and above of raw intelligence, 95th percentile of coding ability, and then you start on The Gauntlet.”

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The price of admission isn’t paid in dollars—there are no tuition fees. Instead, the cost is a student’s absolute, undivided attention.

“It is pretty grueling, but it’s invigorating and I love doing this,” said Nataly Smith, one of the “Gauntlet Challengers.”

Smith, whose passions lie in biotech and space, recently channeled her love for bioscience to complete one of the program’s challenges. Her team was tasked with building a project called “Geno.”

“It’s a tool where a person can upload their genomic data and get a statistical analysis of how likely they are to have different kinds of cancers,” Smith described.

Incredibly, her team built the AI-powered tool in just one week.

The ultimate prize waiting at the end of the grueling 10-week gauntlet is a guaranteed job offer with a starting salary of at least $200,000 a year. And hiring partners are already lining up to recruit challengers like Nataly.

“We very intentionally chose to partner with everything from seed-stage startups all the way to publicly traded companies,” said Brett Johnson, Gauntlet’s COO. “So Carvana is a hiring partner. Here in Austin, we have folks like Function Health. We have the Trilogy organization; we have Capital Factory just around the corner. We’re big into the Austin tech community and looking to double down on that.”

In a world desperate for skilled engineers, Gauntlet AI isn’t just training people; it’s manufacturing the very talent pipeline it believes will power the next wave of technological innovation.