At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work. Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
Yes, but do any of them work for Zuckerberg or with LeCun? The impression I've been getting is they see the idea of superintelligence as more like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, rather than as a Culture Mind.
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Oppenheimer's value generation is not captured by him, but by the taxpayers (and whoever is the funder of his endeavours).
A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250 Million Pay Packages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766758
We let that article take precedence on the front page, as the top commenter on this thread makes a good point that the comparisons to the Manhattan Project and Space Race can be regarded a red herring and diminish the weight of the article. The NYT story on the front page focuses on the central topic of comp offers to A.I. talent.
Think about all the useful and necessary things that professional athlete's salaries dwarf.
I feel that at least these researchers are getting paid their perceived value instead of all that value being absorbed by FANNG.
I think AI research is sort of like cutting a diamond, where every few percent more efficient could result in huge sums saved in infrastructure costs for training and inference and Capex.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.