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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

> A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.

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...

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A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.

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 ;)

> Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention.

Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

you misunderstood the parent post - "connected" is meant to be understood as "privately capture", rather than participation.

Oppenheimer's value generation is not captured by him, but by the taxpayers (and whoever is the funder of his endeavours).

The fact does not contradict economic analyses, it points out what a great shift there has been.

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.

> for the perceived common greater good

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

> People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI!

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.

The author of the article appears to think that Oppenheimer's intellectual contributions were superior to those of the "AI" implementers.

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.

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