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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's a lot of half-truths in the article and some of the comments here.

1. The $100M is a huge number. Maybe there was 1 person, working on large-scale training or finetuning, who had an offer like this, which surely was a high offer even in base (like let's say $1M+), and had a lot of stock and bonus clauses, which over 4+ years could have worked out to a big number. But I don't believe that the average SWE or DE ("staffer") working on the OpenAI ChatGPT UI Javascript would get this offer..

2. One of the comments here says "[Zuck] has mediocre talent". I worked at Facebook ~10 years ago, it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure it's still an impressive set of people overall.

Disclaimer: I don't work in the LLM space, not even in the US tech space anymore.

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Comments aimed at Zuck’s talent always seem jealous to me. An argument can be made that he lacks a good moral compass using specific public examples but I haven’t seen any similar evidence to argue a lack of talent.

I also know many folks who’ve worked at Meta. Almost all of them are talented despite many working there regretfully.

They did “pay” $14B to the CEO of ScaleAI. $100M sounds plausible, relatively.

Is it just me, or does Mr. Wang give grifter/charleton vibes. Like I get you don't hand 14bb and positions like this to 28 year olds for nothing. He seems like a really good salesperson mostly, which sometimes give me pause. However, I'm sure Meta needs excellent sales people... for 14bb though? Like did Meta really need labeling/training infra? Idk, the whole deal is weird to me.

It's incredible to me that talent != moral values is this widespread. I know this was pre-Cambridge Analytica but the writing was on the wall, and we see the same with each new tech wave.

Whenever I ask such people, they talk about the incredible perks, stock options, challenges. They do say they are overburdened though.

These are people who would be rich anyway, and could work anywhere, doing much more good.

They’re people who would have been on wall street in another era a lot of the time. Smart people focused on money.

> "[Zuck] has mediocre talent"

I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.

> "[Zuck] has mediocre talent"I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.

I know Zuck personally and this is one of the big understandings to do with him. If you adjust his selector switch (just below the 3rd rib-like component on the pseudo thorax) to "science and engineering", you'll find he's the most brilliant guy ever, like Data from Star Trek! But this mode consumes some CPU cycles normally spent on hu-man interactions so he can come off as awkward.

A year or two back we switched it to "JW" (Jack Welch) and a sticky-fingered unix programmer spilled diet mountain dew all over the switch, it's been stuck there ever sense, hence here we are, hence the reputation for no-talent. It's there we just have to figure out how to get that switch jarred loose.

> it was the highest concentration of talent

What a waste of a generation

Re: Mark. I agree. It surprised me to no end that he knew the staffing and open headcount of every team. I was a manager for most of my tenure, but his interactions with Lars, Chris and others were always insightful enlightening.

OpenAI has very few employees, so I think it's possible for the correct ones. Crazier things have happened.

> it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life

And yet they don’t have much to show for it.

aside from a $1.75 trillion market cap

Such an impressive life achievement for those employees

3B people use the products daily for an hour on average. FB products are the primary way these people communicate with their friends & families online.

And among those popular products, the main and only decent one is Whatsapp, because it was already good when they bought it and fortunately haven't touched it much since then.

the product (practically unchanged for decades) existed long before most were employed there I would assume. It's like saying you had a great life achievement by being employed at Coca-Cola while their soda existed

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