[HN Gopher] A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
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A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
Author : jrwan
Score : 146 points
Date : 2025-08-02 11:34 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| gedy wrote:
| I suppose I'd rather hire 250 bright kids with $1 million package
| each instead, but I suppose it gets pr.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Just glancing through the article, it seems like this person is
| a doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid") and their doctorate is
| literally in the exact thing that everyone is throwing gobs and
| gobs of cash at. And I guess Meta (et al) sense that literal
| empires are at stake here, so this is probably just how much
| money that's worth to them.
| 48terry wrote:
| > doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid")
|
| Media has this strange need for fully-grown responsible
| adults to be thought of as children. Not only for the amazing
| stories of "this (mid-30s career professional) kid did
| something", but also helpful to try and shirk responsibility.
|
| Thinking about attempts to frame SBF as a wee smol bean kid
| in over his head while actively committing fraud.
| saulpw wrote:
| Ph.D. dropout.
| bsder wrote:
| Taking immediately available cash instead of finishing a
| PhD is almost always a good economic decision (we'll leave
| aside the fact that a PhD is almost always a _disastrously
| bad_ economic decision).
|
| You can always go back and finish your PhD later.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| For almost every Doctorate except for a few who really want
| to become postdocs or somehow win the tenure lottery, there
| is a generally an economic disincentive to completing it.
| NHQ wrote:
| Thats only 25M in 2025 dollars.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| Still not enough to afford the house I grew up in in San Jose.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| and what exactly is this "whiz" kid capable of doing that you and
| I cant
| beng-nl wrote:
| I have a feeling you're missing this question:
|
| and what exactly did this "whiz" kid do that you and I didn't
| warofwords wrote:
| I think Meta has a problem of none of their users wanting any
| more of their services and they have a very distinct brand taint
|
| Paying 250m to a genius to more deeply entrap user time and
| attention is going to look diabolical unless there are measurable
| user life improvement outcome measurements... if metas more slop
| addiction that 250m is a diabolical contract
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| What am I doing with my life...
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Imagine if any one of these tech companies decided the future was
| in solving problems for humanity rather than how to serve adverts
| in a future where content was autogenerated.
|
| The money and resources they have available is astronomical.
|
| Instead they spend it on future proofing their profits.
|
| What a sad world we have built.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| one of my favorite songs embodies this concept:
|
| https://soundcloud.com/adventurecapitalists/moving-mt-fuji
|
| lyrics: https://genius.com/Adventure-capitalists-moving-mt-
| fuji-lyri...
|
| but it's not the same reading the lyrics, you really need to
| hear his voice
| makeitdouble wrote:
| At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with
| money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the
| way forward either.
|
| Very aptly, the Manhattan Project or Space Race weren't aimed
| at the improvement of mankind per se. Motivation was a lot more
| specific and down to earth.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with
| money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like
| the way forward either.
|
| Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money
| and just spread it around.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| It's all a bit depressing that we have the ability to do so
| much as a species but we don't work together.
| midnightclubbed wrote:
| For a few years it seemed like Tesla and SpaceX were those
| companies - reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, boosting
| clean transportation and solar, pushing forward space
| exploration.
|
| But the promises turned into stock boosting lies; the
| environmental good into vote buying for climate change deniers,
| and space exploration into low earth cell-towers.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > For a few years it seemed like Tesla
|
| Those years were a long time ago for me. I've been arguing
| musk is a snake oil salesman since at _least_ 2014. I lost
| friends over it at the time, people who were very heavily
| invested into musk, both financially and for some reason,
| emotionally.
| anon191928 wrote:
| how is he snake oil s. since that time, he with his several
| teams, actually made electric cars a market wide reality,
| cheap orbit rockets and with starlink internet almost
| everywhere possible on earth? snake oil would be over
| without actually changing the history.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > he with his several teams, actually made electric cars
| a market wide reality
|
| Electric cars? That would be Martin Eberhard and Marc
| Tarpenning, Tesla's actual founders. They created the
| Roadster and brought the vision. Musk came in with money,
| staged a hostile takeover, and then rewrote the company's
| history to fit his inflated ego, like the sad little man
| he is. It's honestly cringe.
|
| > cheap orbit rockets and with starlink internet almost
| everywhere possible on earth
|
| Amazing what billions in government contracts and
| management smart enough to keep Elon out of the way can
| accomplish. SpaceX deserves praise; spinning it into a
| Elon is a genius narrative? Not so much.
|
| As for the snake oil, just a few of Elon's greatest hits:
|
| 1. Hyperloop. Old idea's wrapped in new buzzwords. Never
| viable. He didn't invent it, but he sure wants you to
| think he did, just like with Telsa.
|
| 2. FSD "next year" since forever. Still not here. Still
| being marketed like it's solved. And still charging like
| a wounded bull for it.
|
| 3. Robotaxis and appreciation hype. Musk literally
| claimed Teslas would go up in value and earn passive
| income as robotaxis. It doesnt get much more snake oil
| than this.
|
| "We're confident the cars will be worth more than what
| you pay for them today." - July 2019
|
| "It's financially insane to buy anything other than a
| Tesla." - April 2019
|
| Absolutely laughable. Show me one consumer owned Tesla
| that's worth more today than it was in 2019. I'll wait.
| If you can't, we'll mark it down as snake oil bullshit.
|
| 4. Optimus. Elon hyped this like Tesla had cracked
| general purpose humanoid robotics out of nowhere,
| leapfrogging companies that have been grinding on this
| for decades. The first reveal? A guy in a suit dancing.
| The follow ups? Stiff prototypes doing slow, assisted
| movements and following that, remotely controlled
| animatronics and so on. Meanwhile, Musk is on stage
| talking about replacing human labor, reshaping the
| economy, and bots becoming more valuable than cars. None
| of it is remotely close. But it worked, stock popped,
| headlines flooded in, and the fantasy sold.
|
| 5. SolarCity. An overhyped, underdelivered money pit that
| Tesla had to bail out. Just another Elon tyre fire.
|
| 6. "Funding secured." Flat out lied about taking Tesla
| private at $420. SEC slapped him, but the stock soared.
| Mission accomplished.
|
| And that's just scratching the surface of his bullshit.
| It ignores all the other missed deadlines, quality
| issues, inflated delivery claims, etc etc etc. Here is
| some more of his bullshit, also I am sure not exhaustive:
|
| https://elonmusk.today/
|
| Yes, he's had wins. But wins don't erase the mountain of
| bullshit. Elon's biggest output isn't cars or rockets.
| It's hype. His true skill is selling fantasy to retail
| investors and tech worshipping middled aged white dudes
| who still think he's some genius messiah. Strip the PR
| away, and you've got a guy who overpromises,
| underdelivers, and never stops running his mouth.
| anon191928 wrote:
| man I'm so sorry for you. Like if you can't understand
| what some people lead or achieve, which is real with
| rockets and such. You just write long BS for you bias.
| Have a good day
| tzury wrote:
| Do you need any more signs, or is it clear now?
|
| For me the Meta storm of billions in hiring was enough to start
| selling any tech giant related stock.
|
| It is about to crash, harder than ever.
| smokel wrote:
| Or it might go up.
| raphinou wrote:
| I thought that when Apple reached a market cap of 1 trillion,
| but here we are today.... I since then abandoned any such
| prediction, even if i share your feeling
| anon191928 wrote:
| it's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a
| lot in the system. I mean debt
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Hard numbers for market cap is a difficult measure - Apples
| price earnings is 33 currently, which is high but not over
| high. Ie. Apple has revenue to back their market cap.
|
| The issue with high salaries is that there is a latent
| assumption that these people provide the multiples in
| additional value. That they are so smarter than everyone
| else.
|
| This is simply not true, and will lead to a competitive
| disadvantage.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Why aren't they smarter than others?
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Probabiliatically improbable - just like the world's most
| important cryptographic schemes rely on low probability
| of hash collision.
|
| But feel free to prove me wrong - I am ammendable.
| serial_dev wrote:
| The fact is that the incumbents with all their money are in a
| good position to defend against anything and counterattack.
|
| When OpenAI was making waves the first time, then Google
| launched their neutered incapable competitor, I thought it is
| "over" for Google because why would anyone use search anymore
| (apart from the 1% of use cases where it gives better results
| faster), and clearly they are incapable of building good new
| products anymore...
|
| and now they are there with the best LLMs and they are at the
| top of the pack again.
|
| Billions of dollars in the bank, great developers, good
| connections to politicians and institutions mean that you are
| hard to replace even if you fumble it a couple of times.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Combined with the trump economy its going to be interesting. I
| pulled out in end of January when they were actually going
| forward with tariffs in the most stupid way possible.
| jatora wrote:
| Funny there's trillions of dollars in the span of two years
| literally pointing to the writing on the wall and you're so
| arrogant and blinded by cope that you can't see it. You legacy
| engineers really are something else.
| saubeidl wrote:
| Maybe it's the legacy capitalists that are really something
| else?
| ehnto wrote:
| You have exactly the same level of conviction toward an
| unknowable outcome, I think both of you would be better
| served by reading the middle ground instead of subscribing to
| a false dichotomy of boom or bust.
|
| I think the biggest confuser here is that there are really
| two games being played, the money game and the technology
| game. Investments in AI are going to be largely driven by
| speculation on their monetary outcome, not technological
| outcome. Whether or not the technology survives the Venture
| Capital Gauntlet, the investment bubble could still pop, and
| only the businesses that have real business models survive.
| Heaps of people lose their shirt to the tune of billions, yet
| we still have an AI powered future of some kind.
|
| All this to say, you can both be certain AI is a valuable
| technology and also believe the economics around it right now
| are not founded in a clear reality. These are all bets on a
| future none of us can be sure of.
| jatora wrote:
| You can absolutely be sure of market forces not destroying
| established behemoths. It simply doesn't happen frequently.
| Inertia is a real thing. Look at Uber, Tesla, etc. I dont
| think there necessarily won't be a bust for many fledgeling
| AI companies though, in fact I'm certain there will be.
|
| But thinking Tech Giants are going to crash is woefully
| ignorant of how the market works and indicates a clear
| wearing of blinders. And it's a common one among coders who
| feel the noose tightening and who are the types of people
| led by their own fear. And i find that when you mix that
| with arrogance, these three traits often correlate with
| older generations of software engineers who are poor at
| adapting to the new technology. The ones who constantly
| harp on how AI is full of mistakes and disregard that
| humans are as well. The ones who insist on writing even
| more than 70% of their own code rather than learning to
| guide new tools granularly. It's a take that nobody should
| entertain or respect.
|
| As for your point on 'future none of us can be sure of.'
| I'll push back on that: It is not clear how AGI or ASI will
| come about, ie. what architecture will underpin it. However
| - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will
| continue to improve, and that algorithmic progress can and
| will be driven by AI coders, and that that will lead to
| ASI.
|
| The only way to not believe that is to think there is a
| special sauce behind consciousness. And I tend to believe
| in scientific theory, not magic.
|
| That is why there is so much VC. That is why tech giants
| are all racing. It isn't a bet. It is a race to a visible,
| clear goal of ASI that again, it takes blinders to not see.
|
| So while AI is absolutely a bubble, this bubble will mark
| the transition to an entirely new economic system, society,
| world, etc. (and flip a coin on whether any of us survive
| it lol, but that's a whole separate conversation)
| simianwords wrote:
| what does Meta hiring have to do with a crash? if anything it
| shows increase because of the amount of investment put into it.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Where would put their money into though? It's such a weird
| economy, especially with the expected decrease in younger
| population.
| demiters wrote:
| Before an imminent recession you might want to focus on funds
| that primarily cover sectors that enjoy steady demand even
| during crisis, like utilities, consumer staples, healthcare,
| maybe some hedge against inflation like precious metals. I
| would avoid tech and luxuries and would definitely avoid
| crypto also. There is no historical data to show how it would
| perform during a serious recession (Bitcoin was basically
| born during the last one) but I doubt it would be pretty.
| saubeidl wrote:
| European defense stocks seem like a pretty good bet right
| now.
| louiskhub wrote:
| Unfortunately "defense" almost always seems like a good bet
| laardaninst wrote:
| Stock buybacks and cryptocurrency are ways to circumvent the
| Fed's monopoly on currency. The US is not a single monetary
| economy anymore, it's several. None of the economic analysis
| institutions know work anymore.
|
| We're sailing uncharted waters, all bets are off.
| em500 wrote:
| That's similar to what people on HN said a few decades ago when
| Google bought Youtube and Facebook bought Instagram and
| Whatsapp for billions.
| saubeidl wrote:
| It might be time to sell your USD too, while you're at it.
| Don't think it won't take it all with it.
|
| EUR:USD has been rising for a reason.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > It is about to crash, harder than ever.
|
| It is indeed; those people hired at those salaries are not
| going to "produce" more than the people hired at normal
| salaries.
|
| Because what we have now is a "good enough" so getting a 10x
| better LLM isn't going to produce a 10x increase in revenue
| (nevermind profit).
|
| The problem is not "We need a better LLM" or "We need
| cheaper/faster generation". It's "We don't know how to make
| money of this".
|
| That doesn't require engineers who can creat the next
| generation SOTA in AI, that requires business people who can
| spot solutions which simply needs tokens.
| tropicalfruit wrote:
| > It is about to crash, harder than ever.
|
| and then immediately bounce back to higher than it was before
| monero-xmr wrote:
| There are sports stars who are paid similarly - rare talent that
| is in demand. Luckily there aren't "software unions" like there
| are players' unions to cap the max payment.
|
| Any left wing / socialist person on HN should be ecstatic -
| literally applauding with grins on their faces - that workers are
| extracting such sums out of the capitalist class. The hate for
| these salaries is mind boggling to me, and shows a lot of
| opposition to labor being paid what they are due is more about
| envy than class consciousness
| ggm wrote:
| What percentage of the income is going towards funding future
| socialism?
|
| Because if it's not funding the revolution (peaceful or
| otherwise) why exactly would a leftist applaud these salaries?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You didn't read marx and the person above you clearly did.
|
| Marx hated the bourgeoisie (business owners, including
| petite-bourgeoisie AKA small business owners) and loved the
| proletariat - including the extremely skilled or well paid
| proletarians.
|
| Marx also hated the lumpen-proletariet - AKA prostitutes,
| homeless, etc.
| ggm wrote:
| One of my favourite Marx reminiscences is how his
| colleagues tried to buy him some IPR to provide for his
| wellbeing in later life: patent rights. Literally rent
| seeking on innovation. I'm not sure if it's in Emile Burns
| biography.
|
| What I did or didn't read is alas occluded from you. The
| Masereel illustrated woodcuts on a recent edition of the
| manifesto are wonderful.
| anabab wrote:
| wait-wait-wait. So a SWE investing in VT is just a well-
| skilled proletarian owning a share of the global means of
| production? is this communism already?
| lawik wrote:
| Well I applaud their ability to get that bag. But in terms of
| raising the floor for a lot of people, this is not that.
|
| I don't feel strongly about these salaries beyond them being an
| indication of deep dysfunction in the system. This is not
| healthy, for a market or for a society. No-one should be paid
| these amounts but I don't care about these developers because
| they don't run the system.
|
| I've benefited from devs being paid well. Not that well. But
| same thing in concept.
| kgwgk wrote:
| People also complain about the high salaries of CEOs. A lot of
| opposition to labor being paid what they are due is more about
| envy than class consciousness.
| tossandthrow wrote:
| That is not an appropriate comparison as sports _stars_ (you
| write it yourself) is in the entertainment industry - they are
| paid for their talent.
|
| A 1b $ anonymous software engineer is likely leading to 5000
| more revenue than a 200k talented Ai engineer.
| simianwords wrote:
| you just described how it is the same thing
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Yeah, I forgot a "not" leading to...
| simianwords wrote:
| it was never about rising salaries, it was always about upper
| middle class urbanites showing fake concern towards the lower
| class by disparaging people who earn more than them.
|
| one would think that a talented academic/researcher getting a
| 1B salary would impress the socialist people but it doesn't
| because it was never about that. it was about bringing rich
| people down and not much else.
| hollerith wrote:
| Would you say that same thing about executives and CEOs?
|
| I'm guessing not, but both the AI expert and the CEO are agents
| for the owner class: it is owners like Elon and Sam Altman that
| are deciding to pay these huge salaries and they are doing it
| for the same reason that corporate boards of directors pay CEOs
| huge salaries: namely, to help the owners accumulate more
| capital.
| benreesman wrote:
| I don't get the down votes. Any good leftist likes seeing
| skilled workers having unskilled rentiers over the barrel.
|
| Personal anecdote time. One of the people named in the press as
| having turned down one of these hyper-offers used to work in an
| adjacent team, same "pod" maybe, whatever adjacent. That person
| is crazy smart, stands out even among elite glory days FAANG
| types. Anyways they left and when back on the market I was part
| of the lobby to get them back at any price, had to run it
| fairly high up the flagpole (might have been Sheryl who had to
| sign off, maybe it was Mark).
|
| Went on to make it back for the company a hundred fold the
| first year. Clearly a good choice to "pay over market".
|
| Now it's a little comical for it to be a billion or whatever,
| that person was part of a clique of people at that level and
| there's a lot of "brand" going into a price tag like that: the
| people out of our little set who did compilers or whatever
| instead of FAIR are just as good and what is called "AI" now is
| frankly not that differentiated (the person in question
| maintained as much back in the day).
|
| But a luck and ruthlessness hire like Zuckerberg on bended knee
| to a legitimate monster hacker and still getting dissed?
| Applause. I had Claude write a greentext for the amusement of
| my chums. I recommend it kek.
| ehnto wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment but the issue is still really clear.
| This guy getting so much money hasn't made anything more equal,
| it's just added another individual to an elite class of wealth.
| Had these salaries been distributed across everyone as it is
| clearly affordable to do, it would be a different story.
|
| This gentleman now has an entirely different set of problems to
| everyone else. Do you think he will now go on to advocate for
| wealth equality, housing affordability, healthcare etc, or do
| you think he'll go buy some place nice away from his former
| problems and enjoy his (earned) compensation in peace?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| It's good to at least see them call out wealth concentration as a
| driving factor here. The reason companies are paying insane
| amounts of money is that companies have insane amounts of money.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Good for him. Unfortunately, though, what I have seen is that
| luminaries like this never match their external accomplishment
| once inside. I have names I saw firsthand but it would be rude to
| share. A couple of exceptions come to mind. It seems Marc Levoy
| has been as effective pushing imaging technology inside BigCo's
| as he was at Stanford Research, e.g. But more often it's one-hit
| wonders.
| meekaaku wrote:
| why the negativity? no one bats an eye when ronaldo/messi or
| steph curry or other top athletes get insane salaries.
|
| These AI researchers will probably have far more impact on
| society (good or bad I dont know) than the athletes, and the
| people who pay them (ie zuck et al) certainly thinks its worth
| paying them this much because they provide value.
| ehnto wrote:
| They do bat an eyelid, many leagues even introduce salary caps
| in order to quell the negative side effects of insane salaries
| in sports.
| meekaaku wrote:
| ok maybe bat an eyelid,
|
| but I dont see news articles about athletes in such
| negativity, citing their young age etc.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Salary caps are more about keeping smaller clubs competitive.
| Is it really the case here? I think if this guy's company was
| acquired for $1B and he made $250M from the sale, people
| wouldn't be surprised at all.
| mutatio wrote:
| Crab mentality, the closer proximity to your profession / place
| in society the more resentment/envy. This is a win for some of
| us in tech, it's just not us, so we cannot allow it! Article
| even mentions the age of "24" as if someone of that age is
| inherently undeserving.
| quonn wrote:
| Ronaldo competes in a sport that has 250 million players
| (mostly for leisure purposes) worldwide, who often practice
| daily since childhood, and still comes out on top.
|
| Are there 250 million AI specialists and the ones hired by Meta
| still come out on top?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Huh the pool being so small is exactly why they're fought
| over. Theres tiering in research through papers and products
| built. Even if the tiering is wrong, if you can monopolize
| the talent you strike a blow to competitors.
| meekaaku wrote:
| I bet there are more professional footballers than AI
| researchers hence AI researchers will tend to get paid more.
|
| Also much more people are affected by whatever AI is being
| developed/deployed than worldwide football viewers.
|
| Top 5 football leagues have about 1.5billion monthly viewers.
| Top 5 AI companies (google, openai, meta etc) have far more
| monthly active users.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| My personal negativity stems from Meta in particular having a
| negative net impact on society. And no small one either.
| Everything Zuckerberg touches turns to poison (basically King
| Midas in reverse). And all that money, all that _progress_ , is
| directed towards the detriment of everyone but a few.
|
| In contrast, a skilled football player lands somewhere between
| neutral and positive, as at the very least they entertain
| millions of people. And I'm saying that as someone who finds
| football painfully dull.
| jdcasale wrote:
| Anyone on earth can completely and totally ignore football and
| it will have zero consequences for their life.
|
| The money here (in the AI realm) is coming a handful of
| oligarchs who are transparently trying to buy control of the
| future.
|
| The difference between the two scenarios is... kinda obvious
| don't you think?
| prewett wrote:
| I'm going with envy. Athletics is a completely different skill
| from software, and one that is looked down on by posters here,
| judging by the frequent use of "sportsball". "Sportsball"
| players make huge salaries? Whatever, not my thing, that's for
| normies. But when software researchers make 1000x my salary?
| Now it's more personal. Surely they are not 1000x as good as
| me. It seems unlikely that this guy is 1000x as skilled as the
| average senior developer, so there's some perceived unfairness,
| too.
|
| But I counsel a different perspective: it's quite remunerative
| to be selling tulips when there's a mania on!
| pseudo0 wrote:
| Funding is so plentiful right now that they are really competing
| with acquihire rates. That amount might sound crazy as straight
| salary, it comes with multi-year golden handcuffs and avoids
| having to buy them out for billions if they go start their own
| endeavor.
| dave333 wrote:
| It's still peanuts compared to what owners make when their
| startup goes big. Seems reasonable that there's still room for
| small startups in AI with smarter approaches that don't require
| Manhattan project scale at a big company. Whether successful
| startups should sell out to big companies or become one
| themselves is the 64 billion question.
| teekert wrote:
| Interestingly about 190.000 is what our prime minister makes and
| where public service salaries are capped here in the Netherlands.
|
| Edit oops, knowledge was outdated, it's about 270.000.
| NHQ wrote:
| This is all about industrial robotics. In order to train robotics
| AI, Zuckyrberg must create realistic "embodied" farmvilles for
| users to play. This is likely the only path to robotics for
| facebook, hence the ballistic spending.
| yahoozoo wrote:
| Not to make less of the guy, but aside from being a winner of a
| paper contest, the other ventures do not seem very novel: a
| startup to create AI agents that can use the Internet?
| Seems...common.
| merelysounds wrote:
| https://archive.is/t9HRT
| siva7 wrote:
| Ok people, is this for real like are these detached IC roles or
| are these articles talking about executive rolles filled by a.i.
| researchers?
| Avicebron wrote:
| As far as I know it's only one guy that got this offer,
| https://mattdeitke.com/ (aside from the others who had the
| mythical 100 million dollar poaching package).
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Source: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+
| packages
|
| They are IC roles for the most part
| mr90210 wrote:
| Are you aware of the terms of such offers?
|
| I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially
| contingent upon achieving certain milestones.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Even amongst the packages, there is a range. One example
| package was 100 guaranteed up to 250 based on milestones
| and incentives over five years
| coderatlarge wrote:
| they are executive roles in the sense that you are required
| to profitably allocate a scarce perishable resource (gpu
| time) way more expensive than any regular engineer's time.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| Yeah, you could definitely look at it that way. They are IC
| roles in the sense that their job is to tell computer
| computers what to do but maybe that's old-fashioned
| thinking at this point.
| apwell23 wrote:
| murati was offered 1B by meta apparently
| smokel wrote:
| It's similar to how, near the end of a Monopoly game, a player
| might indiscriminately hand over a stash of $100 bills to acquire
| Mediterranean Avenue, even though the property is mortgaged.
| mathgeek wrote:
| Which analogy(s) are you going for? The world is about to end
| so money is essentially worthless? The players with all the
| money are going to move on to something else soon? The game
| ceased to be fun for anyone so they all want to find other
| things to do?
|
| I assume you are going for "there are no more useful resources
| to acquire so those with all the resources overpay just to feel
| like they own those last few they don't yet own".
| qgin wrote:
| I think the idea is the end of the game is nearing (AGI) and
| specific dollar amounts mean less than the binary outcome of
| getting there first.
| tough wrote:
| if we get AGI and a post-scarcity age what makes these
| people think they -reaching- AGI will make them kings.
|
| seems like governments will have a thing to say about who's
| able to run that AGI or not.
|
| GPU's run on datacenters which exist in countries
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| Yes but countries are run by governments, which are
| composed of people, who can be bribed. If you believe
| that AI will make you the richest person in human
| history, you presumably can see that the problem of
| government can be solved with enough money.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> the problem of government can be solved with enough
| money_
|
| Tokyo Professor and former Beijing Billionaire CEO Jack
| Ma, may disagree.
| mhb wrote:
| Presumably they think that, whatever chance they have of
| becoming kings if they get there first is more than the
| chance if someone else does. In _we get AGI_ , we is
| doing all the work.
| smokel wrote:
| I was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even
| though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a
| game.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I saw the 'forgetting about money, moving on to other
| challenges' thing happen about 30 years ago. A childhood
| friend sold his company for about 300 million (a billion in
| today's dollar devaluation?). My friend and his wife
| continued to live in their same house. The only thing he did
| was to purchase eight houses for extended family members who
| didn't own their own homes, he also got his daughter
| expensive horse back riding lessons and a horse, and he said
| he and his wife drank more expensive wine. He did continue to
| play "The Infinite Game" by staying in the tech industry - it
| seemed like he loved the game, the money was only to help
| other people in his life.
| cornfieldlabs wrote:
| Is that friend Josh Kopelman?
| saubeidl wrote:
| Capitalism is about to break. The revolution is coming.
| Nevermark wrote:
| If capitalism breaks it will be to the benefit of very few.
|
| Granted, capitalism needs maintenance.
|
| Externalities need to be consistently reflected, so
| capitalism can optimize real value creation, instead of
| profitable value destruction. It is a tool that can be very
| good at either.
|
| Capitalism also needs to be protected from corrupted
| government by, ironically, shoring up the decentralization
| of power so critical for democracy, including protecting
| democracy from capitalism's big money.
|
| (Democracy and capitalism complement each other, in good
| ways when both operating independently in terms of power,
| and supportively in terms of different roles. And,
| ironically, also complement each other when they each
| corrupt the other.)
| fidotron wrote:
| Good for those involved being offered such packages, but it
| really does raise the question of what exactly those offering
| them are so afraid of.
|
| For example, Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later
| have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style
| competitor, but it's hard to see how such a thing could emerge
| from the current social media landscape.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| They just want the best, and they're afraid of having second
| rates, B-players, etc., causing a bozo explosion. That seems
| like all the motivation that's needed.
|
| Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?
| lores wrote:
| Just like in football, buying all the best players pretty
| much guarantees failure as egos and personal styles clash and
| take precedence over team achievement. The only reasons one
| would do that are fear, vanity, and stupidity, and those have
| to be more important than getting value for the extraordinary
| amounts of money invested.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yeah, pretty much agree.
|
| The only case where this may have made sense - but more for
| an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire
| of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the
| transformer architecture, had made a number of
| architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus
| had a track record of being able to wring performance out
| of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of
| money.
| dekhn wrote:
| Noam was already one of Google's top AI researchers and a
| personal friend of Jeff Dean (head of Google AI, at least
| in title). He worked on some of the early (~2002) search
| systems at Google and patented some of their most
| powerful technoloigies at the time- which were critical
| in making Google Search a product that was popular, and
| highly profitable.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| First rate A-players are beyond petty ego clashes,
| practically by definition... otherwise they wouldn't be
| considered so highly (and thus fall into the bozo
| category).
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Coming from Meta, I have to wonder if the reason for this
| isn't more down to Zuck's ego and history. He seems to have
| somewhat lost interest in FaceBook, and was previously all-in
| on the Metaverse as the next big thing, which has failed to
| take off as a concept, and now wants to go all-in on "super-
| intelligence" (seems to lack ambition - why not "super-duper
| extra special intelligence"?) with his new vision being smart
| glasses as the universal AI interface. He can't seem to get
| past the notion that people want to wear tech on their head
| and live in augmented reality.
|
| Anyhow, with the Metaverse as a flop, and apparently having
| self-assessed Meta's current LLM efforts as unsatisfactory,
| it seems Zuck may want to rescue his reputation by throwing
| money at it to try to make his next big gamble a winner. It
| seems a bit irrational given that other companies, and
| countries, have built SOTA LLMs without needing to throw
| NBA/NFL/rockstar money around.
| turnsout wrote:
| This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books
| like Jobs--as a visionary who introduced technology that
| changed the world.
|
| He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs
| _and_ smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same
| universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He
| went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still
| needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime,
| there 's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam
| Altman.
|
| The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will
| still probably get the credit as the visionary.
| godelski wrote:
| I don't think he gave up on the metaverse. Isn't AR glasses
| a stepping stone towards that? Or rather LLM voice
| assistant a stepping stone towards AR glasses? And the
| metaverse being a stepping stone towards a holodeck?
|
| I mean I'm with you, I think these things are pretty far
| away and are going to cost a lot of money to make and
| require a lot of failure in the mean time. But then again,
| it looks like they spent ~$18bn on Reality Labs last year.
| So if he was funding it all on his own dime, his current
| $260bn of wealth would give him a good 14 years runway if
| we ignore interest. It would be effectively indefinite if
| he earns about a 5% interest on that money.
|
| I guess I'm just trying to say, it's hard to think about
| these things when we're talking about such scales of
| wealth. I mean at those scales, I'm pretty sure the money
| is meaningless, that money (and the ability to throw it
| around) is more a proxy for ego.
| InterviewFrog wrote:
| Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people
| are capable of operating at an elite level. The talent pool is
| extremely small and the companies want the absolute best.
|
| It is the same thing in sports as well. There will only ever be
| one Michael Jordan one Lionel Messi one Tiger Woods one Magnus
| Carlsen. And they are paid a lot because they are worth it.
|
| >> Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to
| fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style
| competitor
|
| Meta moved on from facebook a while back.It has been years
| since I last logged into facebook and hardly anybody I know
| actually post anything there. Its a relic of the past.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of
| people are capable of operating at an elite level. [...] It
| is the same thing in sports as well.
|
| It's not just uncomfortable but might not be true at all.
| Sports is practically the opposite type of skills: easy to
| measure, known rules, enormous amount of repetition. Research
| is unknown. A researcher that guarantees result is not doing
| research. (Coincidentally, the increasing rewards in academia
| for incrementalist result driven work is a big factor in the
| declining overall quality, imo.)
|
| I think what's happening is kind of what happened in Wall
| Street. Those with a few documented successes got
| disproportionately more business based to a large part on
| initial conditions and timing.
|
| Not to take away from AI researchers specifically, I'm sure
| they're a smart bunch. But I see no reason to think they
| stand out against other academic fields.
|
| Occam's razor says it's panic in the C-suites and they
| perceive it as an existential race. It's not important
| whether it actually _is_ , but rather that's how they feel.
| And they have such enormous amount of cash that they're
| willing to play many risky bets at the same time. One of them
| being to hire/poach the hottest names.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Hot fucking take - but if these 100 (or whatever small number
| is being thrown around these days) elite researchers
| disappeared overnight, the world would go on and little of it
| would be noticed. New people in the field would catch up, and
| things would be up to speed quick enough.
|
| It is not a question of exquisitely rare intellect, but
| rather the opportunity and funding/resources to prosper.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| While I don't doubt that these people have great experience
| and skills what they really have that others don't is
| connections and the ability to market themselves well.
| amelius wrote:
| Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but now with AI
| researchers.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| When will the bubble pop?
| mr90210 wrote:
| I think we'd need a major war or a pandemic of sorts because we
| have become pretty good at maintaining such bubble inflated.
|
| Whenever and however it comes, it's going to be a bloodbath
| because we haven't had a proper burst since 2008. I don't count
| 2020.
| nl wrote:
| Eventually people might consider that just maybe... it's not
| a bubble...
| firesteelrain wrote:
| I just don't think the industry is moatless. Where there is
| a moat in my opinion is airgap because few are pursuing
| this and not everyone wants their data in the Cloud.
| DonsDiscountGas wrote:
| 2000 was a bubble, and yet the internet continued to eat
| the world after it popped. I expect we'll see something
| similar
| impossiblefork wrote:
| There is definitely a bubble though. Tesla has 28 times
| larger market cap than other well-run competitors, for
| example, and there's a bunch of other firms with similarly
| crazy numbers.
|
| AI is great and it's the future, and a bunch of people will
| probably eventually turn it into very powerful systems able
| to solve industrially important maths and software
| development problems, but that doesn't meant they'll make
| huge money from that.
| mattlondon wrote:
| When more than 1 company has "AGI", or whatever we're calling
| it, and people realise it is not just a license to print money.
|
| Some people are rightly pointing out that for quite a lot of
| things right now we probably already have AGI to a certain
| extent. Your average AI is _way_ better than the average
| schmuck on the street in basically anything you can think of -
| maths, programming, writing poetry, world languages, music
| theory. Sure there are outliers where AI is not as good as a
| skilled practitioner in _foo_ , but I think the AGI bar is
| about being "about as good as the average human" and not
| showing complete supremacy in every niche. So far the world has
| been disrupted sure, but not ended.
|
| ASI of course is the next thing, but that's different.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a
| lot of the time. I think it's easy for really competent
| people to get an inflated sense of how good the AI is in the
| same way that a junior engineer is often only as good as the
| senior leading them along and feeding them small chunks of
| work. When led with great foresight, careful calibration, and
| frequent feedback and mentorship, a mediocre junior engineer
| can be made to look pretty good too. But take away the
| competent senior and youre left pretty lacking.
|
| I've gotten some great results out of LLM's, but thats often
| because the prompt was well crafted, and numerous iterations
| were performed based on my expertise.
|
| You couldn't get that out of the LLM without that person most
| of the time.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Nah. The models are great, but the models can also write a
| story where characters who in the prompt are clearly
| specified as never having met are immediately addressing each
| other by name.
|
| These models don't understand anything similar to reality and
| they can be confused by all sorts of things.
|
| This can obviously be managed and people have achieved great
| things with them, including this IMO stuff, but the models
| are despite their capability very, very far from AGI. They've
| also got atrocious performance on things like IQ tests.
| tempodox wrote:
| "AGI" will be whatever state of the art we have at the time
| the money runs out. The investors will never admit that they
| built on sand but declare victory by any means necessary,
| even if it's hollow and meaningless.
| mhb wrote:
| That's a lot of confidence that this is a bubble rather than an
| existential race. Maybe you're making bank betting that view?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Not sure what you mean but if I was to invest I would have
| invested years ago in NVIDIA.
| snowstormsun wrote:
| 2027
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Perhaps when society balances benefits of AI against energy and
| environmental costs? I have worked through two 'AI winters'
| when funding dried up. This might happen again.
|
| I think a possible scenario is that we see huge open source
| advances in training and inference efficiency that ends up
| making some of the mega-investments in AI infrastructure look
| silly.
|
| What will probably 'save' the mega-spending is (unfortunately!)
| the application of AI to the Forever Wars for profit.
| chvid wrote:
| When we are seeing down rounds on OpenAI. OpenAI is currently
| valued at 300B.
| abtinf wrote:
| HN shows this as google.com, but the link is directly to
| nytimes.com. Bug?
| stevage wrote:
| The link is a google.com redirect. You probably have an
| extension installed that auto-resolves such redirects.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It's a redirect.
| tomhow wrote:
| We updated the link to its redirect URL.
| tomhow wrote:
| _At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the
| Space Race_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765193 - Aug
| 2025 (66 comments)
| jokoon wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm not sure that training myself to do ai would
| increase my odds of getting a job
| betaby wrote:
| Probably not. Definitely not if live outside of the USA.
| ivape wrote:
| At those prices they have to be hiring god gifted talent. I can't
| imagine that being just a regular academic grinder with top
| grades. Arod made $250 million and it was considered huge news.
| gosub100 wrote:
| aww, they can't be sleazy CEO types who "make number go up" for
| 2-3 years and leave with a golden parachute?
| ivape wrote:
| No, it's a 24-year old:
|
| https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-
| lur...
| dmurray wrote:
| What really, private industry pays top performing individuals
| more than the government ever did?
| normie3000 wrote:
| How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Get a PhD in a related field like math or computer science.
| seanbarry wrote:
| And have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge
| of AI research.
| coderatlarge wrote:
| actually applied math or statistics.
| kergonath wrote:
| That is unfortunately far from enough. The majority end up
| doing ok but nowhere near this much money.
| lossolo wrote:
| There are millions of people with PhDs in math or computer
| science, and none of them earn that kind of salary. Just like
| there are Usain Bolts and Michael Phelpses in the world of
| sports, there are similarly exceptional individuals in every
| field.
| beau_g wrote:
| These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the
| first try. They are simply not like you and me.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| These are not just people with credentials, but are literally
| some of the smartest people on earth. Us normal people cannot
| and should not think we were just a few decisions away from
| being there.
| BSOhealth wrote:
| These figures are for a very small number of potential people.
| This leaves out that frontier AI is being developed by an
| incredibly small number of extremely smart people who have
| migrated between big tech, frontier AI, and others.
|
| Yes, the figures are nuts. But compare them to F1 or soccer
| salaries for top athletes. A single big name can drive billions
| in that context at least, and much more in the context of AI.
| $50M-$100M/year, particularly when some or most is stock, is
| rational.
| AIPedant wrote:
| A very major difference is that top athletes bring in real
| tangible money via ticket / merch sales and sponsorships,
| whereas top AI researchers bring in pseudo-money via investor
| speculation. The AI money is far more likely to vanish.
| brandall10 wrote:
| It's best to look at this as expected value. A top AI
| research has the _potential_ to bring in a lot more $$ than a
| top athlete, but of course there is a big risk factor on top
| of that.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| If you imagine hard enough, you can expect anything. e.g.
| Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
| brandall10 wrote:
| Sure, but the idea these hires could pay out big is
| within the realm of actual reality, even if AGI itself
| remains a pipe dream. It's not like AI hasn't already had
| a massive impact on global commerce and markets.
| AIPedant wrote:
| The _expected value_ is itself a random variable, there is
| always a chance you mischaracterized the underlying
| distribution. For sports stars the variance in the
| _expected_ value is extremely small, even if the variance
| in the _sample_ value is quite large - it might be hard to
| predict how an individual sports star will do, but there is
| enough data to get a sense of the overall distribution and
| identify potential outliers.
|
| For AI researchers pursuing AGI, this variance between
| distributions is arguably even worse than the distribution
| between samples - there's no past data whatsoever to build
| estimates, it's all vibes.
| brandall10 wrote:
| We've seen $T+ scale impacts from AI over the past few
| years.
|
| You can argue the distribution is hard to pin down (hence
| my note on risk), but let's not pretend there's zero
| precedent.
|
| If it turns out to be another winter at least it will
| have been a fucking blizzard.
| AIPedant wrote:
| The distribution is merely tricky to pin down when
| looking at _overall_ AI spend, i.e. these "$T+ scale
| impacts."
|
| But the distribution for _individual researcher salaries_
| really is pure guesswork. How does the datapoint of
| "Attention Is All You Need?" fit in to this distribution?
| The authors had very comfortable Google salaries but
| certainly not 9-figure contracts. And OpenAI and
| Anthropic (along with NVIDIA's elevated valuation) are
| founded on their work.
| brandall10 wrote:
| When Attention is All You Need was published, the market
| as it stands didn't exist. It's like comparing the pre-
| Jordan NBA to post. Same game, different league.
|
| I'd argue the _top_ individual researchers figure into
| the overall AI spend. They are the people leading teams
| /labs and are a marketable asset in a number of ways.
| Extrapolate this further outward - why does Jony Ive
| deserve to be part of a $6B aquihire? Why does Mira
| Murati deserve to be leading a 5 month old company valued
| at $12B with only 50 employees? Neither contributed
| fundamental research leading to where we are today.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these
| global sporting institutions.
|
| How much revenue does Google make in a day? PS700m+.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| My understanding is that the bulk of revenue comes from
| television contracts. There has been speculation that that
| could easily shrink in the future if the charges become more
| granular and non-sports watching people stop subsidizing the
| sports watching people. That seems analogous to AI money.
| positron26 wrote:
| OOf. Trying awfully hard to have a bad day there eh?
| magic_man wrote:
| Top athletes they have stats to measure. I guess for these
| researchers I guess there are papers? How do you know who did
| what with multiple authors? How do you figure out who is Jordan
| vs Steve Kerr?
| thefaux wrote:
| Yeah, who knew that Kerr would have the more successful
| overall career in basketball?
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| It's just a matter of taste, but I am pleased to see publicity
| on people with compensation packages that greatly exceed actors
| and athletes. It's about time the nerds got some recognition.
| My hope is that researchers get the level of celebrity that
| they deserve and inspire young people to put their minds to
| building great things.
| layer8 wrote:
| The money these millions are coming from is already based on
| nerds having gotten incredibly rich (i.e. big tech). The
| recognition is arguably yet to follow.
| dbacar wrote:
| how do you know they are nerds?
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Sounds vindictive. And yet. According to Forbes, the top 8
| richest people have a tech background, most of whom are
| "nerdy" by some definition.
| hkt wrote:
| Those are nerds who did founding rather than being an
| employee, though. Maybe that's the distinction they're
| trying to make?
| moomin wrote:
| It's closer to actors and athletes than we'd all hope, in
| that most people get a pittance or are out of work while a
| select few make figures that hit newspapers.
| yreg wrote:
| Intel made an ad series based on a similar idea in ~2010.
|
| "Our Rock Stars Aren't Like Your Rock Stars"
|
| https://youtu.be/7l_oTgKMi-s
| godelski wrote:
| I think I'm mostly with you but it also depends how it
| exactly plays out.
|
| Like I definitely think it is better for society if the
| economic forces are incentivizing pursuit of knowledge more
| than pursuit of pure entertainment[0]. But I think we also
| need to be a bit careful here. You need some celebrities to
| be the embodiment of an idea but the distribution can be too
| sharp and undermine, what I think we both agree on is, the
| goal.
|
| Yeah, I think, on average, a $100M researcher is generating
| more net good for a society (and world) than a $100M sports
| player or actor. Maybe not in every instance, but I feel
| pretty confident about this on average. But at the same time,
| do we get more with one $100M researcher or 100 $1M
| researchers? It's important to recognize that we're talking
| about such large sums of money that at any of these levels
| people would be living in extreme luxury. Even in SV the per
| capita income is <$150k/yr, while the median income is medium
| income is like half that. You'd be easily in the top 1%. (The
| top 10% for San Jose is $275k/yr)
|
| I think we also need to be a bit careful in recognizing how
| motivation can misalign incentives and goals. Is the money
| encouraging more to do research and push humanity's knowledge
| forward? Or is the money now just another means for people
| that just want money to exploit, who have no interest in
| advancing humanity's knowledge? Obviously it is a lot more
| complicated and both are happening but I think it is worth
| recognizing that if things shift towards the latter than they
| actually make it harder to achieve the original goals.
|
| So on paper, I'm 100% with you. But I'm not exactly sure the
| paper is matching reality.
|
| [0] To be clear, I don't think entertainment has no value. It
| has a lot and it plays a critical role in society.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Frontier AI that _scales_ - these people all have extensive
| experience with developing systems that operate with hundreds
| of millions of users.
|
| Don't get me wrong, they are smart people - but so are
| thousands of other researchers you find in academia etc. -
| difference here is scale of the operation.
| torginus wrote:
| Yeah, I guess if you have a datacenter that costs $100B, even
| hiring a humble CUDA assembly wizard that can optimize your
| code to run 10% faster is worth $10B to the company.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| 10% is an enormous amount. Let's say 1%.
|
| Even if it's 1% at the scale you're talking that's 1B to
| the company. So still worth it.
|
| Wild.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
| bbminner wrote:
| Hm, I thought that these salaries were offered to actual
| "giants" like Jeff Dean or someone extremely knowledgeable in
| the specifics of how the "business side" of AI might look like
| (CEOs, etc). Can someone clarify what is so special about this
| specific person? He is not a "top tier athlete" - I looked at
| his academic profile and it does not seem impressive to me by
| any measure. He'd make an alright (not even particularly great)
| assistant professor in a second tier university - which is
| impressive, but is by no means unique enough to explain this
| compensation.
| bbminner wrote:
| A PhD dropout with an alright (passable) academic record, who
| worked in a 1.5-tier lab on a fairly pedestrian project
| (multimodal llms and agents, sure), and started a startup..
| Reallyttrying to not sound bitter, good for him, I guess, but
| does it indicate that there's something really fucked up with
| how talent is being acquired?
| naveen99 wrote:
| Molmo was pretty slick
| cm2187 wrote:
| What I don't understand in this AI race is that the #2 or #3 is
| not years behind #1, I understand it is months behind at worst.
| Does that headstart really matter to justify those crazy comps?
| Will takes years for large corporations to integrate those
| things. Also takes years for the general public to change their
| habits. And if the .com era taught us anything, it is that none
| of the ultimate winners were the first to market.
| storus wrote:
| LLaMA 4 is barely better than LLaMA 3.3 so a year of
| development didn't bring any worthy gains for Meta, and execs
| are likely panicking in order not to slip further given what
| even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to them.
| godelski wrote:
| > given what even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to
| them.
|
| I think a lot of people have a grave misunderstanding of
| DeepSeek. The conversation is usually framed comparing to
| OpenAI. But this would be like comparing how much it cost
| to make the first iPhone (the literal first working one,
| not how much each Gen 1 iPhone cost to make) with the cost
| to make any smartphone a few years later. It's a lot easier
| and cheaper to make something when you have an example in
| hand. Just like it is a lot easier to learn Calculus than
| it is to invent calculus.
|
| Which that framing weirdly undermines DeepSeek's own
| accomplishments. They did do some impressive stuff. But
| that's much more technical and less exciting of a story (at
| least to the average person. It definitely is exciting to
| other AI researchers).
| peterlk wrote:
| There is a group of wealthy individuals who have bought in to
| the idea that the singularity (AIs improving themselves
| faster than humans can) is months away. Whoever gets there
| first will get compound growth first, and no one will be able
| to catch up.
|
| If you do not believe this narrative, then your .com era
| comment is a pretty good analysis.
| godelski wrote:
| > There is a group of wealthy individuals who have bought
| in to the idea that the singularity is months away.
|
| My question is "how many months need to pass until they
| realize it isn't months away?"
|
| What, it used to be 2025? Then 2027? Now 2030? I know these
| are not all the same people but there are trends of to keep
| pushing it back. I guess Elon has been saying full self-
| driving is a year away since 2016 so maybe this belief can
| sustain itself for quite some time.
|
| So my second question is: does the expectation of
| achievements being so close lengthen the time to make such
| achievements?
|
| I don't think it is insane to think it could. If you think
| it is really close you'd underestimate the size of certain
| problems. Claim people are making mountains out of
| molehills. So you put efforts elsewhere, only to find that
| those things weren't molehills after all.
|
| Predictions are hard and I think a lot of people confuse
| critiques with lack of motivation. Some people do find
| flaws and use them as excuses to claim everything is
| fruitless. But I think most people that find flaws are
| doing so in an effort to actually push things forward. I
| mean isn't that the job of any engineer or scientist? You
| can't solve problems if you can't identify problems.
| Triaging and prioritizing problems is a whole other mess,
| but it is harder to do when you're working at the edge of
| known knowledge. Little details are often not so little.
| godelski wrote:
| What I don't understand is with such small of a gap why this
| isn't a huge boon for research.
|
| While there's a lot of money going towards research, there's
| less than there was years ago. There's been a shift towards
| engineering research and ML Engineer hiring. Fewer positions
| for lower level research than there were just a few years
| ago. I'm not saying don't do the higher level research, just
| that it seems weird to not do the lower level when the gap is
| so small.
|
| I really suspect that the winner is going to be the one that
| isn't putting speed above all else. Like you said, first to
| market isn't everything. But if first to market is all the
| matters then you're also more likely to just be responding to
| noise in the system. The noisy signal of figuring out what
| that market is in the first place. It's really easy to get
| off track with that and lose sight of the actual directions
| you need to pursue.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah this makes zero sense. Also unlike a pop star or even a
| footballer who are at least reasonably reliable, AI research
| is like 95% luck. It's very unlikely that any AI researcher
| that has had a big breakthrough will have a second one.
|
| Remember capsule networks?
| perks_12 wrote:
| I can print jersey with Neymars name on it and drive revenue. i
| can't do that with some ai researcher. they have to actually
| deliver and i don't see how a person with $100M net-worth will
| do anything other than coast.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| I take this as a contrarian signal that Meta has hit serious
| roadblocks improving their AI despite massive data advantages and
| are throwing a bunch of "Hail Mary" desperation passes to achieve
| meaningful further progress.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > I take this as a contrarian signal that Meta has hit serious
| roadblocks improving their AI despite massive data advantages
|
| Just a thought:
|
| Assuming that Meta's AI _is_ actually good. Could it rather be
| that having access to a massive amount of data does not bring
| _that_ much of a business value (in this case particularly for
| training AIs)?
|
| Evidence for my hypothesis: if you want to gain a deep
| knowledge about some complicated specific scientific topic, you
| typically don't want to read a lot of shallow texts
| tangentially related to this topic, but _the few_ breakthrough
| papers and books of the smartest mind who moved the state of
| art in the respective area. Or some of the few survey
| monographs of also highly smart people who work in the
| respective area who have a vast overview about how these deep
| research breakthroughs fit into the grander scheme of things.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Assuming that Meta 's AI is actually good. Could it rather
| be that having access to a massive amount ..._
|
| Most would say, vibe-wise Llama 4 fell flat in face of Qwen &
| friends.
| master_crab wrote:
| There's been a lot of research on the necessity of singular
| geniuses. The general consensus (from studies on Nobel Prizes
| and simultaneous patent rates) is that advances tend to be
| moved by the research community as a whole.
|
| You can get that technical or scientific context for a lot
| less than $250 million per head.
| hooloovoo_zoo wrote:
| Yes but you can also instantly advance to the state of that
| person's former company's research state which cost them
| way more than 250M.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| 250 million probably gets you a couple of research labs and
| incremental field advances per year?
|
| Assuming a lab has 20 phds/postdocs and a few professors,
| call it 25 people per lab, and you're compute / equipment
| heavy, getting you up to an average of 1M per person per
| year in total fully loaded costs (including facilities
| overhead and GPUs and conferences and whatnot), then you're
| looking at 200 PhD researchers. Assuming that each PhD
| makes one contribution per 4 years, then that's 50 advances
| in the field per year from your lab. if only 10% are
| notable, that's 5 things you've gotten that people are
| going to get excited about in the field. You need 2% of
| these contributions to be groundbreaking to get a single
| major contribution per year.
|
| So 250M for a single person is a lot, but if that person is
| really really good, then that may be only expensive and not
| insane.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Wonder what their contracts look like. Are these people gonna be
| grinding their ass off at the Meta offices working crazy hours?
| Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills
| to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum
| success? And if so, what does that form of success look like? So
| far the vision that Zucc has outlined has been rather
| underwhelming, but maybe the vision which he shares with insiders
| is different from his public persona.
|
| I can't help but think that the structure of this kinda hints at
| there being a bit of a scam-y element, where a bunch of smart
| people are trying to pump some rich people out of as much money
| as possible, with questionable chances at making it back. Imagine
| that the people on The List had all the keys needed to build AGI
| already if they put their knowledge together, what action do you
| think they would take?
| walterbell wrote:
| _> Imagine.. had all the keys needed_
|
| .. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| As the margins shrink between the capabilities of each of these
| models, those who specialize in retrieval / context engineering
| will be the next frontier. Those who provide the most relevant
| information to a model will win the day.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| There has to be more at play here. Was this some kind of
| acquihire? No 24 year old in the history of 24 year olds has been
| worth $250 million on the basis of their intellectual merit. Even
| granting that they were some kind of one-off super genius, no
| single human is _that_ smart or productive, to be worth the
| bankroll of a literal army of PhDs. He has to be bringing more to
| the table.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Lol. I was leading development of a project that did everything
| his project Vy does and much more, before my company experienced
| a hostile takeover and I was squeezed out so they could pivot to
| a shitass AI sex bot company that ultimately ran through our
| warchest and failed. That was back in 2022-2023.
|
| Maybe I need to get one of these recruitment agents.
| thefaux wrote:
| Honestly, I think a lot of this is as much marketing as it is
| about actual value. This helps the industry narrative about how
| transformative the tech is. These inflated comp packages
| perfectly match the inflated claims around the tech. "See this
| tech is so incredible we are paying people 1 BILLION dollars!"
|
| These types of comp packages also seem designed to create a kind
| of indentured servitude for the researchers. Instead of forming
| their own rival companies that might actually compete with
| facebook, facebook is trying to foreclose that possibility. The
| researchers get the money, but they are also giving up autonomy.
| Personally, no amount of money would induce me to work for
| Zuckerberg.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Is there anything one can do to get in on this? Did I have to be
| at Stanford getting a PhD 10 years ago, or can I somehow still
| get on the frontier now as a generic software engineer who's
| pretty good at learning things, and end up working at one of
| these labs? Or is it impossible to guess exactly what is going to
| be desirable a few years from now that might get you in the game
| at that caliber?
| turnsout wrote:
| I'll give you two completely different and conflicting
| opinions!
|
| _Bear case:_ No, there 's nothing you can do. These are
| exceptionally rare hires driven by FOMO at the peak of AI
| froth. If any of these engineers are successful at creating
| AGI/superintelligence within five years, then the market for
| human AI engineers will essentially vanish overnight. If they
| are NOT successful at creating AGI within five years, the ultra
| high-end market for human AI engineers will also vanish,
| because companies will no longer trust that talent is the key.
|
| _Bull case:_ Yes, you should go all in and rebrand as a self-
| proclaimed AI genius. Don 't focus on commanding $250M in
| compensation (although 24, Matt Deitke has been doing AI/ML
| since high school). Instead, focus on optimizing or changing
| any random part of the transformer architecture and publishing
| an absolutely inscrutable paper about the results. Make a
| glossy startup page that makes some bold claims about how
| you'll utilize your research to change the game. If you're
| quick, you can ride the wave of FOMO and start leveling up.
| Although AGI will never happen, the opportunities will remain
| as we head into the "plateau of productivity."
| master_crab wrote:
| This is one of those comments that is enjoyably cynical...and
| conceivably accurate.
| layer8 wrote:
| If it were possible to guess, enough people would do it to
| drive the price to down to reasonable levels. Unless maybe you
| believe you are in the top 100 or so in the world able to do
| what it takes.
| akomtu wrote:
| You need to be a someone who has a high chance of creating an
| AI-centric company.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| Alright you twisted my arm im in. Already did a couple AI
| centric projects. HMU let's do this. Personally I want a
| bazaar for AI. not sure I like the future being decided by
| the current crop of billionaires.
| tempodox wrote:
| To me it's just fascinating to see how much further you can pump
| up this hype bubble. My pop corn reserves need a refill.
| dekhn wrote:
| When I was a kid in the 80s I read the book "Hackers" and it
| describes the most successful people in the industry as having
| "Croesus" wealth: counted in the tens of millions of dollars.
| noobermin wrote:
| When the crash hits, it will hit hard.
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| These big winners could retire their entire social circle.
| ofjcihen wrote:
| People are focused on the skills these people must possess or the
| experience.
|
| Chances are good that while they're competitive for sure, what
| they really have that landed them these positions is connections
| and the ability to market themselves well.
| martin-t wrote:
| Of course, their job is to make their own job redundant. If they
| are true believers, this is the last paycheck they might ever
| get.
|
| After that, it's manual labor like the plebs or having enough
| savings to ~~last them the rest of their lives~~ invest and
| "earn" passive income by taking a portion of the value produced
| by people who still do actual work.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| This strikes me as "end game" type behavior. These companies see
| the writing on the wall, and are willing to throw everything they
| have left to retain relevance in the coming post-AGI world. To me
| I'm more alarmed than I am shocked at the pay packages.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| They're being paid to not do their own startup and become
| competition.
| amelius wrote:
| Not sure if that's really smart.
|
| With $250M they can easily buy their own competitive AI compute
| rig ...
| airspresso wrote:
| Keep in mind that these compensation packages are mostly
| stock that doesn't unlock for years, so no, can't buy an AI
| compute rig today with that.
| apparent wrote:
| This is the result of the winner-take-all (most) economy. If the
| very best LLM is 1.5x as good as good as the next-best, then
| pretty much everyone in the world will want to use the best one.
| That means billions of dollars of profit hang in the balance, so
| companies want to make sure they get the very best people (even
| if they have to pay hundreds of millions to get it).
|
| It's the same reason that sports stars, musicians, and other
| entertainers that operate on a global scale make so much more
| money now than they did 100 years ago. They are serving a market
| that is thousands of times larger than their predecessors did,
| and the pay is commensurately larger.
| mi_lk wrote:
| > winner-take-all (most)
|
| > If the very best LLM is 1.5x as good as good as the next-
| best, then pretty much everyone in the world will want to use
| the best one
|
| Is it? Gemini is arguably better than OAI in most cases but I'm
| not sure it's as popular among general public
| apparent wrote:
| I don't think there's a consensus on this. I have found
| Gemini to be so-so, and the UX is super annoying when you run
| out of your pro usage. IME, there's no way to have continuity
| to a lower-tier model, which makes is a huge hassle. I
| basically never use it anymore.
| decimalenough wrote:
| In other words, what matters is not just which one is
| "best"?
| apparent wrote:
| If the Google model was 50% better than OpenAI I would
| have bought a subscription, which would moot the UX
| issue. But IME it isn't discernibly better at all, let
| alone 50% better.
| esafak wrote:
| It's multivariate; better for _what_? None of them are best
| across the board.
|
| I think what we're seeing here is superstar economics, where
| the market believes the top players are disproportionately
| more valuable than average. Typically this is bad, because it
| leads to low median compensation but in this rare case it is
| working out.
| toddmorey wrote:
| I don't see a winner takes all moat forming. If anything, the
| model providers are almost hot-swappable. And it seems the
| lifespan for being the best SOTA model is now measured in
| weeks.
| apparent wrote:
| It's true they are currently quite interchangeable these
| days. But the point is that if one can pull far enough ahead,
| it will get a much bigger share of the market.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The actual OpenRouter data says otherwise.[1] Right now, Google
| leads with only 28.4% marketshare. Anthropic (24.7%), Deepseek
| (15.4%), and Qwen (10.8%) are the runners-up.
|
| If this were winner-take-all market with low switching costs,
| we'd be seeing instant majority market domination whenever a
| new SOTA model comes out every few weeks. But this isn't
| happening in practice, even though it's much easier to switch
| models on OpenRouter than many other inference providers.
|
| I get the _perception_ of "winner-take-all" is why the
| salaries are shooting up, but it's at-odds with the reality.
|
| [1] https://openrouter.ai/rankings
| nextworddev wrote:
| Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost
| sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of
| enterprise adoption
| jjmarr wrote:
| Is there good public data on enterprise adoption?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario. If that is
| to happen, I think the following assumptions must hold:
|
| 1) The winner _immediately_ becomes a monopoly
|
| 2) All investments are directed from competitors, to the winner
|
| 3) Research on AGI/ASI ceases
|
| I don't see how any of these would be viable. Right now there's
| an incremental model arms race, with no companies holding a
| secret sauce so powerful that they're miles above the rest.
|
| I think it will continue like it does today. Some company will
| break through with some sort of AGI model, and the competitors
| will follow. Then open source models will be released. Same
| with ASI.
|
| The things that will be important and guarded are: data and
| compute.
| apparent wrote:
| Yeah, this is why I said "(most)". But regardless, I think
| it's pretty uncontroversial that not all companies currently
| pursuing AI will ultimately succeed. Some will give up
| because they aren't in the top few contenders, who will be
| the only ones that survive in the long run.
|
| So maybe the issue is more about staying in the top N, and
| being willing to pay tons to make sure that happens.
| nsriv wrote:
| I agree with you, and think we are in the heady days where
| moat building hasn't quite begun. Regarding 1) and 3), most
| models have API access to facilitate quick switching and
| agentic AI middleware reaps the benefits of new models being
| better at some specific use-case than a competitor. In the
| not-so-distant future, I can see the walls coming up, with
| some version of white-listed user-agent access only. At the
| moment, model improvement hype and priority access are the
| product, but at some point capability and general access will
| be the product.
|
| We are already seeing diminishing returns from compute and
| training costs going up, but as more and more AI is used in
| the wild and pollutes training data, having validated data
| becomes the moat.
| bgwalter wrote:
| It is sort of an aquihire:
|
| _Mr. Deitke, who recently dropped out of a computer science
| Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, had moonlighted at
| a Seattle A.I. lab, the Allen Institute for Artificial
| Intelligence. There, he led the development of a project called
| Molmo, an A.I. chatbot that juggles images, sounds and text --
| the kind of system that Meta is trying to build._
|
| Probably Zuck is trying to prop up his failed Metaverse with
| "AI". $250 million is nothing compared to what has already been
| sunk into that Spruce Goose.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| One way to make sense of this specific case at least.
|
| - He's on track to becoming a top-tier AI researcher. Despite
| having only one year of a PhD under his belt, he already received
| two top awards as a first-author at major AI conferences [1].
| Typically, it takes many more years of experience to do research
| that receives this level of recognition. Most PhDs never get
| there.
|
| - Molmo, the slate of open vision-language models that he built &
| released as an academic [2], has direct bearing on Zuck's vision
| for personalized, multimodal AI at Meta.
|
| - He had to be poached from something, in this case, his own
| startup, where in the best case, his equity could be worth a
| large multiple of his Meta offer. $250M likely exceeded the
| expected value of success, in his view, at the startup. There was
| also probably a large premium required to convince him to leave
| his own thing (which he left his PhD to start) to become a hired
| hand for Meta.
|
| Sources:
|
| [1] https://mattdeitke.com/
|
| [2] https://allenai.org/blog/molmo
| naveen99 wrote:
| Molmo caught my eye also a while ago.
| tantalor wrote:
| > could be worth...
|
| Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > What's the likelihood of that?
|
| Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount
| of money. :-)
| exasperaited wrote:
| This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which
| should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.
|
| But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta
| on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own
| startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO,
| then good for him.
|
| This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to
| keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy
| it has created.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| I agree on all points. However, if he already had several
| millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg
| would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the
| knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'd forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I'm not rare in
| that.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| So what happens when they achieve AGI? Will a benevolent network
| of vastly smarter-than-human intelligences insist on maintaining
| the wealth hierarchies that humans had before AGI arrived? Isn't
| the point of AGI removing scarcity?
|
| I worry that those who became billionaires in the AI boom won't
| want the relative status of their wealth to become moot once AGI
| hits. Most likely this will come in the form of artificial
| barriers to using AI that, for ostensible safety reasons, makes
| it prohibitively difficult for all but the wealthiest or AGI-lab
| adjacent social circles to use.
|
| This will cause a natural exacerbation of the existing wealth
| disparities, as if you have access to a smarter AI than everyone
| else, you can leverage your compute to be tactically superior in
| any domain with a reward.
|
| All we can hope for is a general benevolence and popular
| consensus that avoids a runaway race to the bottom effect as a
| result of all this.
| catmanjan wrote:
| How can anyone still believe the AGI scam
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a
| scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.
| godelski wrote:
| I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low
| odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a
| 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030
| predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is
| further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys
| from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the
| news.
| omnee wrote:
| Zuck made him and offer that couldn't be refused. But neither
| salaries or hype or hope are what AI should be measured against.
| LLM based AI should be measured against previous technological
| revolutions, in terms of sustained real income growth and ideally
| real income growth per person.
|
| Right now capital expenses are responsible for most of AI's
| economic impacts, as seen by the infrastructure spend
| contributing more to GDP than consumer spending this year.
| exasperaited wrote:
| And yet this one guy's deal possibly represents 0.5% of the
| total profit that everyone _except_ Nvidia is making out of
| this wave of AI. Maybe even more.
| matt_cogito wrote:
| Am I reading this correctly: an AI researcher might get paid
| roughly the same amount of money as the largest transfer of a
| soccer player in history (Neymar at EUR220M)?
|
| There is hope for humanity.
|
| Jokes aside, how and why?
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