A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250M Pay Packages. Just Like NBA Stars | Hacker News Reader

A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250M Pay Packages. Just Like NBA Stars

nytimes.com

17 pointsbreadwinner9 comments

The engineering heart in me is happy in the sense that these people have clearly way more leverage than NBA or professional soccer/football players and should be compensated as such. But it's definitely a change.

Just a few months ago Musk filed a lawsuit in August accusing OpenAI of offering "lavish compensation" to "starve competitors." [1] That's when OpenAI was paying employees 100s of thousands. Now Meta is paying 100s of MILLIONS. Where is Elon Musk now and why is he quiet about this?

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/xai-openai-salary-workers-pa...

I actually love this. Meta, a failing company with no monetizable products left, is wasting its money on chasing the pipe dream of superintelligence. If any of the evil corps deserves such a comic death, that's Meta. And Twitter.

You realize you're posting this on a day Meta stock climbed 11% after reporting record profits?

Yep, I not only realize it, but like Mr. T, I pity the fools who bought in this stock and are thinking of holding it.

Because, let's look at the actual facts:

Facebook is dead, like literally mostly dead people and bots

Whatsapp is getting enshittified by ads and who knows what other crap

Instagram is losing out to TikTok

FacebookAds is a money drain for companies and a totally garbage product

Whatever they were doing with VRs and the Metaverse is...crickets

Why are we even talking about an irrelevant company whose only contribution in the last 10 years was sway a couple of elections and enable a couple of local genocides? Sure, Zuck lying about "superintelligence" and overspending on developers/researchers 250M more than they are worth creates the illusion that there is something going on. But if you objectively look at the trash that is LLAMA and see the cadence of their releases, you'd realize they are in deep deep trouble and no amount of "talent" will save them.

It's funny to watch this unfold on the sidelines.

They have 2B DAU?

One underappreciated aspect of AI’s disruption is its potential to replace much of the web as we know it.

Today, people create content primarily to capture attention—and monetize it through ads. This is the engine fueling giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, who rely heavily on advertising revenue (Meta, for instance, derives 98% of its income from ads). Their entire business model hinges on aggregating user data to target ads more precisely.

But here’s the shift: When LLMs distill content and serve it directly to users, they bypass the original platforms—and their ads. At the same time, LLMs already build detailed user profiles, making ad targeting even more efficient.

This is why Meta is racing to adapt. They recognize that AI could become the primary conduit for ads—and if they don’t control part of that pipeline, their dominance evaporates. The "AI gold rush" isn’t just about superintelligence; it’s about dominating the next generation of advertising.

"the web as we know it" is about to radically change from being an ad delivery vessel to being another ad delivery vessel that's slightly more intrusive

What a time to be alive!

So the LLM platforms have: taken the internet, removed the ads from it and are serving it behind their API for a fee and everyone is opting to use it vs the ad ridden internet.

So it's basically "pay a subscription fee per month to use the internet with no ads". And the advertisers get nothing out of that subscription.

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