A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages | Hacker News Reader

A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages

nytimes.com

287 pointsjrwan547 comments

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

Molmo caught my eye also a while ago.

Same except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree

> could be worth...

Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?

> What's the likelihood of that?

Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)

Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?

If it were me, yeah, park it in bonds and live off the interest on a tropical beach. Spend my days spearfishing and drinking beers with the locals. Have no concerns except how even my tan is (and tbh I don't see myself caring too much about that).

I'd forget the word shareholder even exists.

And let others govern the world?

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

I take that more as a rumination on the futility of vanity and self-aggrandizing rather than "ruling the world " which in the modern day comes down to politics. Yes, there is considerable overlap with ego, but there's more to that topic than pure self-worship.

Sounds good in theory but I'd be bored to death in a month, at most two. Traveling the world...maybe good for a few more months and that's it.

Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

The world is sufficiently large and complex that a few months wouldn’t even scrape the tip of the iceberg.

I agree. I just personally wouldn’t want to wander around exploring it continuously for months without more interesting work/goals. Even though cultures and geography may be wonderfully varied, their ranges are way smaller than what could be.

If you want to improve the lives of many, by all means go for it, I think that is a wonderful ambition to have in live and something I strive for, too!

But we are talking about an ad company here, trying to branch out into ai to sell more ads, right? Meta existing is without a doubt a net negative for mankind.

> Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

Cynical take: increasing Meta's stock value does improve the lifes of many - the many stock holders.

Thus: when you talk about improving lifes, you better specify which group you are targeting, and why you selected this particular group.

I am interested in improving the lives of the many people who cannot afford to be stockholders

The reason I'm interested in this is twofold

First, I think the current system is exploitative. I don't advocate for communism or anything, but the current system of extracting value from the lower class is disgusting

Second, they outnumber the successful people by a vast margin and I don't want them to have a reason to re-invent the guillotine

> they outnumber the successful people by a vast margin

you can be successful and lower class.

What you’re suggesting does not at all require a lot of money.

I met a youngster on Boca del Toro island in Panama a decade or so ago. I was about to be fired from my FAANG job so I used up years and years of vacation for one big trip before I was let go. We hung out for a few days while I was there (I don’t recommend the place at all btw). He cashed out from early twitter and was setting up surf schools all of the world. All he did was travel, surf, drink, and fuck. I’m still angry that laughed at all the dumb startups in the late 2000s instead of joining them. But this guy did what you’re suggesting, and I think there are many more unknown techbros who did it too.

Setting up an international chain of surf schools actually sounds quite ambitious and stressful, though.

I imagine stress is relative to risk. I’d hope someone who has retirement on lock wouldn’t risk that for a side project.

Though for me the risk of the shops failing and people being out of a job would still stress me heh

There are some problems in the world that Meta could help fixing with that money.

Given history of the guy at the helm, most likely won't.

250M is not that much to solve a global problem, just take a look at bill gates fund.

Still huge amount of money which can improve life of millions.

downsize Facebook back to like a couple thousand people max, use the resulting savings to retire and start your own AI instead of doing the whole shadow artist "I'll hire John Carmack/top AI researcher to work for me because deep down I can't believe I'd ever be as good as them and my ego is too afraid to look foolish so I won't even try even if deep down that's what I want more than being a capricious billionaire"?

or am I just projecting my beliefs onto Mark Zuckerberg here?

Retire? Anyone with more than about 10-20 million that continues to work has some sort of pathology that leaves them unsatisfied. Normal people rarely even get to that level because they are too busy enjoying life. Anyone making billions has some serious issues that they are likely stuck with because hubris won't let them seek meaningful help.

> Normal people rarely even get to that level because they are too busy enjoying life.

And that's why these "normal people" don't become insanely rich.

(just to be clear: the reverse direction does not hold: just a tiny fraction of such workaholics will become insanely rich).

> Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?

Yes, I do.

I am aware of some quite deep scientific results that would have a deep impact (and thus likely bring a lot of business value) if these were applied in practice.

It's strange that Zuck didn't just buy options on that guy? (Or did he? Would love to see the terms.)

Zuck's advantage over Sir Isaac (Newton) is that the market for top AI researchers is much more volatile than in South Sea tradeables pre-bubble burst?

Either that or 250M is cheap for cognitive behavior therapy

In this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.

It might make more sense to think of in terms of expected value. Whilst the probability may be low, the payoff is probably many times the $250M if their startup becomes successful.

You can only one roll in the crapshoot of life though.

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

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.

Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.

Woo

Nightmare Future!

If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble.

I have two questions about this, really:

- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?

- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?

That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?

The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.

The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.

"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.

For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.

But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.

And that could burst your bubble.

Sure, though the barrier is quite high to fake it.

Depends on who exactly you’re trying to convince.

> The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates.

You started to sound like Dario, who likes to accuse others as intellectually dishonest and unserious. Anyway, perhaps the strict wage structure of Anthropic will be its downfall in this crazy bubble?

I am accusing no one individually or particularly. I am observing that the problem is that within a bubble, people collectively become increasingly unserious and less intellectually honest as their appetite for risk increases with their desire to get a slice of the action. Indeed, it gets worse as people begin to think it might not last forever.

The same thing happened in the dotcom era, the same thing happened in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Every single bubble displays these characteristics.

There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.

As LLM's get smarter and more capable on smaller and smaller computers Anthropic, Google, Grok, OpenAI, and Meta (is there an acronym, like FAANG, for the giant AI companies? MOGGA? GOMAG?) will have to get creative with profit-drivers, when consumers will have a very capable LLM built-in to their computing device(s), and it can easily be worth the cost to a business to invest in the computing power to provide on-device LLM's to their workers.

MAGOG, certainly.

Oof. Rather on-the-nose.

GAYMAN (Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix)

There's no doubt the primary use for "AI" will be generating rage inducing engagement bait to squeeze a few more seconds of advertising into our days.

Woah, a whopping 0.5%. That's like working 12 minutes more every week. I waste much more time every day because of how slow and sluggish Windows 11 is.

0.5% across all the world's population would be a significant achievement. The fact that you spend this much time in Windows 11 is actually a crime against humanity.

time for another case against Microsoft?

They got off against monopoly charges, how will they handle the ol' "ads in the Start Menu is a crime against humanity on par with genocide"?

Probably like the time Meta handled a genocide in Mynammar: without any serious consequences :DD https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

0.5% of USD 100 trillion per year, with a usual accounting I've seen being that you can count that boost for the next 20 years, is worth 0.5% * $100T/year * 20 years = USD 10 trillion.

Now, we don't have a single investor making this investment nor getting the reward for the investment, but that's the kind of overall shape of the reasoning behind why people are willing to invest so much in AI.

It would be trivial for most of Europe to improve productivity by 0.5% or even 5% but they’re too busy drinking nice wine outside a cafe in the sunshine most of the day.

Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.

I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~=2.5 at most!

I hope for all of our sake's that you're right. I feel confident that you're not :(

Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence".

We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products are an office suite and "study mode".

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo...

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/

This is EXACTLY the same as NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Mars. Some gurus and thought leaders talk big talk while taking gullible investors' money and hope nobody asks them how they plan to turn in a profit.

My edgy prediction is that blunder after blunder (Metaverse, LLAMA, the enshittification of whatsapp, instagram losing heavily to tiktok and facebook having mostly dead accounts) and now giving 250M in vapor-money to youngsters, this is Meta's last stab in the dark before they finally get exposed for how irrelevant they are. Then no amount of groveling to Trump or MMA would be able to save the Zuck from being seen for what he really is: an irrelevant morally bankrupt douche (I could say the same about Elon as well) just trying out random stuff and talking big.

"LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve."

"Nuclear power plants are a very sophisticated steam generator with a few tricks down their sleeve."

These things are both just as true and just as informative.

Nuclear is actually a great example. It's a major scientific accomplishment but pretty much the least cost effective method of energy generation. Nuclear allowed us to generate huge amounts of energy to waste on whatever we like when the real focus should be on massively decreasing energy demands. But of course that doesn't make anyone money.

Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator. You can spend all your effort trying to do something that isn't going to happen without forcing people to do it, and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.

> and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.

Ah, so we have to "deal with the reality of the situation and accept things"? You know who also was being told that? French peasants and middle class, by their king Louis XVI, who told them that they had to accept plummeting living standards and wages. You know how it ended up, right? The king had to deal with the reality of a guillotine.

Some people might accept being used and abused by the capitalistic system as a "natural order of things", but there are people who can envision a world where not everything is about profit, and there are such things as public goods, services, resources, housing, benefits, etc.

> Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator

Says who? Not everything is about profit. The fact that so many in today's society are thinking of capitalism is the natural order of things doesn't make capitalism less fragile, especially if it continues not serving society. When something doesn't serve society, society gets rid of it (usually violently) and replaces it with something else. Many CEOs and oligarchs nowadays forget that, just like the kings before them, until a Luigi comes and reminds them.

> lament that public needs don't make profits,

Whatever the public needs, eventually the public will get, with or without profits involved, and with or without the agreement of the "ruling" class.

That whole comment comes off as unhinged and has nothing to do with development of energy infrastructure for a world population that has growing energy needs.

>energy should not be thought of as a profit generator

By whom are you referring to? By me? The general public? Or the stock holders of the power company?

Energy is a HUGE profit center.

Please prove that human brains don't work as a very sophisticated autocomplete.

When proving you should to prove that they are similar and not that they are dissimilar.

Please use an LLM and prove it yourself. Then use an LLM and prove the opposite. That's how much weight your "proofs" have.

In fact, buy a premium subscription to all the LLMs out there (yes, even LLAMA) and have them write the proof using the scientific method, and submit the papers to me via a carrier pigeon.

Let me meditate on that.

dude, computers are just rocks that we coerced into adding 1’s and 0’s. when are people finally going to wake up?

Other than the rockets and Starlink, I do not trust anything from Musk. Mainly because while everyone whose opinion I trust about rockets says "LGTM", everyone whose opinion I trust on all the other things he does says as per https://xkcd.com/2030/

I don't trust Zuckerberg. Bad vibes about everything Facebook ever since I went to one of their developer conferences in London a bit over a decade ago, only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't even pay for ads on their system, given the ads I see think I want dick pills and boob surgery, and are trying to get me to give up a citizenship I never had in the first place while relocating to a place I've actually left. Sometimes they're in languages I don't speak.

And while I can't say that I have any negative vibes from Altman, I've learned to trust all the people who do say he's a wrong 'un, as they were right about a few other big names before him.

And I wouldn't invest in any of the companies making LLMs, because I think the whole "no moat" argument is being shown to be plausible by way of how close behind all the open models are.

But LLMs are, despite all that, obviously useful even if you see them as only autocomplete. They're obviously useful even if you think they're just a blurry JPEG of the internet. They're obviously useful even if they're never going to meaningfully improve.

LLMs are not like NFTs. Might be like Mars, though.

Tesla self-driving aside, have you ridden in a Waymo? It’s actually pretty magical.

Yeah... Just stay on your toes, I guess. Be open to being wrong, for the sake of you and those around you.

FWIW, "Elon Musk lies" is not a great counterpoint to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

Well, if LLMs were the next coming of Christ, where is the impact of them on open source?

Everyone claims they are awesome and super powerful in their own toy projects or in their private source. Where is the actual impact of LLMs superior power on OSS?

I can tell you:

We are drowning in slop.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/open-source-project-...

I repeat again: a bunch of words strung randomly together is not thought.

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?

I’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.

I weep for humanity.

That $250M is (societally) better off going to him than being spent on whatever the hell Meta was going to otherwise spend it on.

People say that sort of thing when it’s a hypothetical. It’s a little different when a quarter billion dollars is actually on offer.

Hitmen get what, $5-50k? And that’s for murder.

Yeah man, that’s not fucking good.

no it's capitalism at it's finest.

We get less violent because AI research pays more than murder, so more people focus on being good AI researchers than good killers, and the world is happier for it.

That's not at all how anything works.

You're broken

I mean it's not bad when you think about it in terms of an hourly rate.

I think you're forgetting to factor in the tail risks when calculating the rate. In fact I doubt they still qualify as "tail" under those circumstances. There's a fairly decent chance the retirement plan ends up being facing a firing squad.

You need help

Sure. $250M buys a lot of help.

Zuck can take the glory if he wants. Glory doesn’t pay my bills.

He said he’d forego glory, not values.

For $250M I’d still forego all kinds of values.

Everyone has a price.

Mine is a hell of a lot lower than $250M, and I would bet half of that that yours is too.

No amount of money (or torture) can make me work for Meta, Palantir or Amazon.

How do you rank the evil list? For me, Palantir is an easy #1.

Mmm.

Threats of violence might get me to work for any of them; and I don't think I hate Amazon enough to do more than just not use it; but if I were somehow important enough to get a call from Zuckerberg, my answer would be "Meta delanda est", no matter how many digits or how cash-based the proposed offer was.

But I'm not important enough to be noticed, let alone called.

And it's only temporary too, he can work for Meta for a few years and then do whatever he wants for the rest of his life.

> Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

Meta will have more AI-compute than he ever hoped to get at his - and most other - startups.

This is such a weird sentiment to me, comparing taking one of the highest paying corporate jobs in the history of humanity to bowing down to some dictator.

[flagged]

Various BigCo-s have been reporting good results recently and highlighted significant AI role in that. That may be a BS of course, yet even if it is half-true we're talking about tens/hundreds of billions of revenues. With 10x multiple it supports a trillion like generic valuation of AI in business right now.

How much has the whole industry invested in AI vs how much revenue has AI generated in total?

Zuckerberg had a lot to say about AI in his part of Meta's Q2 earnings statement, but the follow-up earnings call [0] revealed the rather limited scope of AI in their ad business so far:

>"The first is enabling business AIs within message threads ... We’re expanding business AIs to more businesses in Mexico and the Philippines. And we expect to broaden availability later this year as we keep refining the product."

>"The second area of business AI development is within ads ... We’re currently testing this with a small number of businesses across Feed and Reels on Facebook and Instagram as well as Instagram Stories."

>"And then the final area that we are exploring is business AIs on business websites to help better support businesses across all platforms ... and we’re starting to test that with a few businesses in the US."

So it's just very small scale tests so far - not the sort of thing that would have any measurable impact on their revenue.

[0]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2...

Please don't post shallow dismissals... - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's fine to think that we're in a bubble and to post a comment explaining your thoughts about it. But a comment like this is a low-effort, drive-by shoot-down of a comment that took at least a bit of thought and effort, and that's exactly what we don't want on HN.

It's also possible, based on what happens to those who win the lottery, that his life could become a lot harder. It's not great to have the fact that you're making $2M a week plastered all over the Internet.

He probably heard the memes, didn't really want to work for Meta and said a "ridiculous" high number and Meta was like: we can do that.

I don’t like this because it inspires my relatives to keep sending me links to these stories and asking why I’m not going to work at Meta and getting my billions. Mark, please do this stuff quietly so I can continue in my quiet mediocrity.

Or you can tell them that zuck is making the world way worse overall and you don’t want to enable that, regardless.

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.

> 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

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.

In other words, what matters is not just which one is "best"?

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.

The hack I found to “get around” the secret limits that pop out of nowhere is to you export the chat, then import it with another account. So you don’t need to pay 200, just 40 (and only when you actually need that much).

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.

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.

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.

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

Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of enterprise adoption

Is there good public data on enterprise adoption?

But those are just the sort of cases that are more likely to switch to the latest, greatest and cheapest when they come around. The fact that even these haven't become winner takes all is a strong signal that these models have sticking power.

No because more than half of open router is character chat and writing ad copies… so it’s not indicative of the important use cases

The top 3 apps are Kilo Code, Roo Code, and Cline.

These are all coding assistants. While they can be turned into waifus they're not intended as such.

Now do aggregations across all apps not just top 3

Actually that is decent data and reflective of current SOTA in terms of cost performance tradeoff

I and most normal people can’t even tell the difference between models. This is less like an arms race and more like an ugly baby contest.

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.

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.

>I think it's pretty uncontroversial that not all companies currently pursuing AI will ultimately succeed.

That's probably true, but at the moment the only thing that creates something resembling a moat is the fact that progress is rapid (i.e. the top players are ~6-12 months ahead of the already commoditized options, but the gap in capabilities is quite large): if progress plateaus at all, the barrier to be competitive with the top dogs is going to drop a lot, and anyone trying to extra value out of their position is going to attract a ton of competition even from new players.

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.

> Right now there's an incremental model arms race

Yes, but just like in an actual arms race, we don't know if this can evolve in a winner takes all scenario very quickly and literally.

> just like in an actual arms race

In an actual arms race you use your arms to actually physically wipe out your enemy.

It's not just like an arms race.

How sure do you feel about that?

Exactly, that's my point.

Well, an "arms race" doesn't always involve using the arms. For example, the Cold War was an arms race, but it was focused on the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, not their actual use.

> I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario.

AI? Do you mean LLMs, GPTs, both, or other?

Why won't AI follow the technology life cycle?

It'll always be stuck in the R&D phase, never reach maturity?

It's on a different life cycle?

Once AI matures, something prevents consolidation? (eg every nation protects its champions)

I agree with this comment.

Maybe it's just me but I haven't been model-hopping one bit. For my daily chatbot usage, I just don't feel inclined to model-hop so much to squeeze out some tiny improvement. All the models are way beyond "good enough" at this point, so I just continue using ChatGPT and switching back and forth from o3 and 4o. I would love to hear if others are different.

Maybe others are doing some hyper-advanced stuff where the edging out makes a difference, but I just don't buy it.

A good example is search engines. Google is a pseudo-monopoly because google search gives obviously better results than bing or duckduckgo. In my experience this just isn't the case for LLM's. Its more nuanced than better or worse. LLM's are more like car models where everyone makes a personal choice on which they like the best.

The problem is models are decaying at incredible speed and being the leader today has limited guarantee you’ll be it tomorrow.

OpenAI has a limited protective moat because ChatGPT is synonymous with generative AI at the moment, but that isn’t any more baked in than MySpace (certainly not in the league of Twitter or Facebook).

Who the heck is making profit?

If the next best model is 0.5x as expensive, then many might opt for that in use cases where the results are already good enough.

At work we are optimising cost by switching in different models for different agents based on use case, and where testing has demonstrated a particular model's output is sufficient.

That is exactly how all of this has played out so far (beep, not at fucking all!)

You are not one random hyperparameter away from the SciFi singularity. You are making iterative improvements and throwing more compute at the problem, as are all your competitors, all of which are to some degree utterly exchangeable.

> 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.

Well only if the price is the same. Otherwise people will value price over quality, or quality over price. Like they do for literally every other product they select...

You’re right.

It would be unfortunate if something like Grok takes the cake here.

Why?

Because it's MechaHitler?

So should we root for Gemini (which depicted Nazis as Black/Asian/etc.) instead? Or Microsoft (whose prior AI chatbot had Nazi-esque tendencies as well)?

No, we should make sure it’s not a winner-take-all scenario.

Most likely won't be a winner-take-all, but something like it is right now, a never ending treadmill where the same 3 or 4 players release a SOTA model every year or so.

There is LLM 1.5x as good as the next best.

I tried multiple and they all fail and some point so I let another LLM take over.

As soon it’s not some boilerplate thing it becomes harder to get the correct result

I don't think so. It's just a bubble. There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots. If someone were to achieve AGI, maybe they win, but it's unlikely to exist. Or if it does, we can't define it.

What would you say if the IMO Gold Medal models from DeepMind and OpenAI turn out to be generalizable to other domains including those with hard-to-verify reward signals?

Hint: Researchers from both companies said publicly they employ generalized reasoning techniques in these IMO models.

Nice. That's really great progress. Maybe a model will be able to infer what consciousness is.

> There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots.

"Fancy chatbots" is a classic AI use case. ELIZA is a well-known example of early AI software.

I'm not familiar with ELIZA. Technical terms mean things. AI has no technical meaning. It's difficult to distinguish what people mean when they say AI, but as technical people I assume we know AGI doesn't exist yet and we don't know if it ever will.

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.

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.

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.

If you imagine hard enough, you can expect anything. e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seriously. The transformer coupled with tons of compute is why we got here. When that paper came out and people (AI researchers) saw the results many were confused or unconvinced. No one has any clue such an architecture would yield the results it has. AI systems has always been far more art than science and we still don’t even really know why it works. I feel like that idea being stumbled upon was sort of more luck than anything…

Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these global sporting institutions.

How much revenue does Google make in a day? £700m+.

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.

OOf. Trying awfully hard to have a bad day there eh?

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?

Yeah, who knew that Kerr would have the more successful overall career in basketball?

This is not remotely true. The gap between them as players far exceeds the gap elsewhere, combined, many times over.

People forget Kerr was a bad GM

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.

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.

how do you know they are nerds?

Sounds vindictive. And yet. According to Forbes, the top 8 richest people have a tech background, most of whom are "nerdy" by some definition.

Those are nerds who did founding rather than being an employee, though. Maybe that's the distinction they're trying to make?

I don’t think this distinction actually exists. At that salary this person is moving from being a founder of his own company to being a founder of his own business unit inside Facebook.

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.

Agree and it's as if these "super smart top researchers" aren't feeding off the insanely hard work of open source contributors who basically got paid nothing to do a bunch of the work they're profiting off.

None of these models are operating in a vacuum.

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

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.

I think it's pretty funny because, for example, Katalin Karikó was thought to be working in some backwater, on this "mRNA" thing, that could barely get published before COVID...and, the original LLM/transformer people were well qualified but not pulling quarter billion dollars kicking around trying to improve machine translation of languages, a time-honored AI endeavor going back to the 1950s. The came upon something with outstanding empirical properties.

For whatever reason, remuneration seems more concentrated than fundamentals. I don't begrudge those involved their good luck, though: I've had more than my fair share of good luck in my life, it wouldn't be me with the standing to complain.

  > Katalin Karikó was thought to be working in some backwater, on this "mRNA" thing, that could barely get published

There's a ton of examples like this, and it is quite common in Nobel level work. You don't make breakthroughs by maintaining the status quo. Unfortunately that means to do great things you can't just "play it safe"

Not really the same, is it? Actors are hired to act. Athletes get paid to improve the sport. It's not like nerds are poached to do academic research or nerd out at their hearts desire. This is a business transaction that Zuck intends to make money from.

Locking up more of the world's information behind their login wall, or increase their ad sales slightly is not enough to make that kind of money. We can only speculate, of course, but at the same time I think the general idea is pretty clear: AI will soon have a lot of power, and control over that power is thought to be valuable.

The bit about "building great things" certainly rings true. Just not in the same way artists or scientists do.

Nerds run the entire world how much recognition do they need?!

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.

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.

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.

Yeah but then you factor in the costs of building and running the machines vs the revenue and realize they are actually burning money for the blind hope of major breakthroughs in cognitive understanding that could be centuries away.

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.

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?

Molmo was pretty slick

> and started a startup

You bring up the only relevant data point at the end, as a throw in. Nobody outside of academia cares about your PhD and work history if you have a startup that is impressive to them. That's the only reason he's being paid.

I think the key was multimodality. Meta made a big move in combining texts, audio, images. I remember imagebind was pretty cool. Allen AI has published some notable models, and Matt seems to have expertise in multimodal models. Molmo looks really cool.

Looking at Molmo description:

"Our key innovation is a new collection of datasets called PixMo that includes a novel highly-detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions, and a diverse mixture of fine-tuning datasets that enable new capabilities. Notably, PixMo includes innovative 2D pointing data that enables Molmo to answer questions not just using natural language but also using non verbal cues. We believe this opens up important future directions for VLMs enabling agents to interact in virtual and physical worlds. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and most critically the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which we have released."

This is a solid engineering project with a research component - they collected some data that ended up being quite useful when combined with pre-existing tech. But this is not rocket science and not a unique insight. And I don't want to devalue the importance of solid engineering work, but you normally don't get paid as much for non-unique engineering expertise. This by no means sounds unique to me. This seem like a good senior-staff research eng project in a big tech company these days. You don't get paid 250M for that kind of work. I know very talented people who do this kind of work in big tech, and from what I can tell, many of them appear to have much more fundamental insight and experience, and led larger teams of engineers, and their comp does not surpass 1-2M tops (taking a very generous upper bound).

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.

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.

  > 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).

If comparing Deepseek to OpenAI, sure. But OP is comparing DeepSeek to Meta: both are followers.

Yes, but there's also more to what I said than just leader-follower.

But muh China.

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.

  > 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.

> My question is "how many months need to pass until they realize it isn't months away?"

It's going to persist until shareholders punish them for it. My guess is it's going to be some near-random-trigger, such as a little-known AI company declaring bankruptcy, but becoming widely reported. Suddenly, investing in AI with no roadmap to profitability will become unfashionable, budget cuts, down-rounds, bankruptcies and consolidation will follow. But there's no telling when this will be, as there's elite convergence to keep the hype going for now.

Indeed, this will continue as long as the market allows it to. There is a well known quote about how long markets can stay irrational, but I would like to remind where we are right now:

Telco capex was $100 billion at the peak of the IT bubble, give or take. There's going to be $400 billion investments in AI in 2025.

why we acting like this group wealthy individuals don't know what happening???

they know it may be or not gonna happen because months its ridiculous, but they still need to do it anyway since if you not gonna ride it, you are gonna miss the wave

stock market has not been rational since??? forever??? like stop pumping and dumping happen all the time

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.

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?

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.

F1 or soccer salaries are high because these are MARKETABLE people. The people themselves are a marketable brand.

They're not high because of performance/results alone.

Rational inside a deeply olligopolistic and speculative market.

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?

> Imagine.. had all the keys needed

.. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.

> "Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum success?"

I suggest we saw a clear demonstration of that with the Metaverse and the answer is no, but more intensely than two letters can communicate.

I agree with you, BUT most of these AI folks have intrinsic motivation for this AI stuff that is on a whole different level compared to their motivation for building the Metaverse. So even though Zuck isn't particularly effective at motivating people or whatnot, these people will be motivated regardless.

What I most would like to understand is how you intend to motivate someone you just gave a quarter of a billion dollars to? Especially a young person. They never have to work again, and neither do their grandchildren.

You can just doodle away with whatever research interests you the most, there's no need to deliver a god mode AI to the great leader even if you had the ability to.

Seems like their only motivation is their desire to succeed, glory, etc.

But that's the thing. These are hired people. Their job is to bring glory to the great leader. Exactly the same way Altman get the OpenAI fame.

If you really had thoughts in your head worth a quarter of a billion, the rational thing to do is not to spill those beans.

Approximately no one is motivated by money they already have.

I mean, if you publish something considered a breakthrough don't you also get glory?

Im sure in the US you can never have enough money

If $250M is still not enough, you are definitely broken.

I think Dario Amodei just said this much on a podcast and that is why he isn't worried.

That they are building a team with a selection bias for this too.

Plenty of people are motivated by the work, not the money.

Given more money they just subcontract out increasing fractions of the overhead of life in order to do more of the work.

Slightly fixed title: "One A.I. researcher is negotiating a $250M pay package in made up money that Meta can produce by typing zeros into a spreadsheet."

Paying with stock is a neat option for companies that are projected to grow - the very reason why all of big tech desperately wants to be perceived as growing - since it doesn't cost them anything, since they can dilute existing stock holdings at will by claiming the thing they are buying with new made up stock will make the company that much richer.

So you as a potential investor should ask yourself, will this one employee make Meta worth $255M more? Assuming they are paying $5M in cash and the rest in stock.

Yeah but its not made up money tho, meta(fb) must buy out stocks at certain point while its true that many of its would vested for period of time. it still cost them in the future

what more embarrassing is that they do this to poach AI talent because they massively behind on AI races, like they literally still to the extend of king of social media (fb,instragram,whatsapp etc)

they should do better given how much data, money, resources they have tbh

I think you are under a misconception as to how this work. Let's say Meta wants to give this person 100M in stock, they don't have to buy 100M worth of stock when the option vests. What they do is, go into their accounting software and look at how many shares they have, let's call this amount X. And they will increase the total number of shares from X to X+Y where Y is worth 100M at current valuation. They never need to spend any cash to do this. It's literally money they can print whenever they want.

Since Meta Platforms' stock is highly liquid, it does not matter much (except maybe for computing taxes) whether Meta sells stock and gives 100M in cash to the employee or gives the employee stock, which the employee then converts into cash.

In either case, the fact that the stock was created is reported to investors, and investors know that the creation reduces the value of every existing share of Meta, which is the feedback mechanism which restricts how much money or value Meta can get out of the creation of new shares of its stock.

Sure, but it's highly liquid stock in a publicly listed company. If someone asked me if I want 99M in cash or 100M in Meta stock, I would rather take 100M in Meta stock. That's how liquid it is. You seem to treat Meta stock as if it was some cryptocurrency with daily volume measured in thousands.

On the receiving side sure, if the contract is written such that you are actually allowed to sell the shares easily, which often you are not.

My main point is that $250M sounds like a huge number, and that it shows how extreme the value of AI is seen. But that's exactly the point. They want to be perceived as thinking AI is worth extreme amounts of capital, suggesting it will ROI even more. Otherwise they wouldn't be spending $250M on one guy right? But here comes the catch, they don't think that one person is worth $250M, they can print money for free and claim this guy is worth this much without having to pay for it. Effectively diluting existing shareholder value. This whole thing works because Meta is seen by investors as a growth stock, they have 10-100x larger earnings to share values than mature stocks like Ford. They are printing money to be able to print more money in the future. Follow up reading [1]

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/

This is plain wrong AFAIK. You can't just print Y stock on a whim because that would dilute shareholders.

https://money.stackexchange.com/a/155106 the argument is that it doesn't dilute the stock because the thing they bought makes the company that much more worth. If they trade newly created shares for a metric ton of gold, that logic seems quite plausible, but it get's more sketchy when things like IP or companies are bought. Or as in this case even more sketchy, where I'd argue this one person will not raise the value of Meta by $250M, effectively scamming the investors.

This generally does not apply to publicly traded companies.

Source please.

Take for example Nortel, they massively increased their number of shares they years before their crash.

Depending on if shareholders have anti-dilution protection, you can

It’s typical in startups for early employees to not have thís protection

VCs demand it

Well, I was wrong. Turns out that's exactly how Facebook pays workers.

Meta buys back stock all the time, in practice they do the opposite of diluting shareholders.

You're right that they don't need to do this.

right, meta literally profit 50+ billion last year or 2 years ago, they literally buy back all the time

also most tech company do this originally as tax loophole for big tech

its nothing to do with printing money or another theory conspiracy like another commenter says

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.

They do bat an eyelid, many leagues even introduce salary caps in order to quell the negative side effects of insane salaries in sports.

ok maybe bat an eyelid,

but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.

You must not follow sports very close. Every time a young supports signs his first big deal, people freak out and compare it to the last superstar's deal. "Young players getting too much money before they earned it" is a trope at this point.

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.

No you're right, capitalism would not do the same thing as a sports club because the sports club has the incentive to be fair.

Though we give ourselves a pass in the name of capitalism, we could also prioritise fairness in our societies.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

> Surely they are not 1000x as good as me. It seems unlikely that this guy is 1000x as skilled as the average senior developer

Will never understand the logic. They is literally better than an average senior dev, if he has been offered 250m package.

It may be envy, but I’m still not sure a direct comparison makes much sense, given how much of a different creature engineering LLMs is from what most devs are doing.

I think negative feelings are coming from more of a “why are they getting paid so much to build a machine that’s going to wreck everything” sort of angle, which I find understandable.

Sports teams pay Ronaldo, Messi, and Curry because they win games and that puts fans in seats and attracts sponsors that pay those teams money and turn a profit.

When someone had a successful business model that offsets the incredible costs let me know, but it is all hypothetical.

I think the reason for the negativity in this forum (and other threads I've seen over the past few months) is because people are engaged with AI and it seems are deep down not happy with its direction even if they are forced to adapt. That negativity spreads I think to people winning in this which is common in human nature. At least that's the impression I'm getting here and other places. The most commented articles on HN these days are AI (e.g. OpenAI model, some blogger writing about Claude Code gets 500+ comments, etc) which shows a very high level of emotional engagement and have the typical offensive and defensive attitude between people that benefit or lose from this. Also general old school software tech articles are drowned out in comparison; AI is taking all the oxygen out of the room.

My anecdotal observation talking to people: Most tech cycles I've seen have hype/excitement but this is the first one I've been in at least that I've seen a large amount of fear/despair. From loss of jobs, automating all the "good stuff", enriching only the privileged, etc etc people are worried. As loss aversion animals fear is usually more effective for engagement especially if it means a loss of what was before - people are engaged but I suspect negative towards the whole AI thing in general even if they won't say it on the record. Fear also creates a singular focus; when you are threatened/anxious its harder for people to engage with other topics and makes you see AI trend as something you would want to see fail. That paints AI researchers as not just negative; but almost changing their own profession/world for the worse which doesn't elicit a positive response from people.

And for the others, even if they don't have this engagement, the fact that this is drowning out other things can be annoying to some tech workers as well. Other tech talks, articles, research, etc is just silent in comparison.

YMMV; this is just my current anecdotal observations in my limited circle but I suspect others are seeing the same.

I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.

This is a great point, but some passions fundamentally require other people and capital.

These AI researchers fundamentally need access to tons of compute, data and engineers in order to pursue their passion.

Eh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.

You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.

Jeez!

A fellow sell-out. Welcome. Those are in abundance, having no honor and ethics

These aren't annual pay packages. It's some "can't retire on that" base salary plus a promise of gradually vesting equity on a multi-year schedule. For public companies, you'll get that amount if you hang around for x years and there is no sudden decline in market price. For non-public companies (OpenAI), the equity is more pie-in-the-sky.

Most sources confirmed that yearly effective pay would be 100M level, unlike the normal tech breakdown.

OpenAI doesn’t do the usual equity for employees, they famously do profit sharing.

I'd expect a few millions of annual pay, anyone could retire on that. Whether someone wants to, it's different but having anything beyond $1M available is definitely sufficient, especially if you're sub-40.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

If you're the only one considering them, sure.

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.

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.

> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones.

Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D

He didn’t have to be the first to be the one most associated with popularizing the technology.

That just shows you how warped the minds of the general public are. They fail to realize the only thing Jobs did was know the right people then take all the credit…

This is how (checks notes) everything has always worked.

In a large project such as introducing the first GUI for general use, you can't do everything yourself. If you're within a company, you hire people. You take inspiration from the outside. It's a team effort, and not the result of a lone genius.

That does not diminish what Jobs did. The Mac and the Lisa were underway before the Xerox PARC visit. The idea of mixed graphics and text were already out there as an ideal—it's pretty obvious if you think about it. Engelbart's demo was already legendary.

But as we all know, it's one thing for a technology to exist in a research lab, and quite another for it to be adopted by millions of people. That's where Jobs was actually exceptional. He was able to manage these massive projects with just the right compromises to take great technology and turn it into great products.

The Lisa product - a business-focussed follow on to the Apple II, was initiated before Jobs visited Xerox, but nonetheless copied Xerox's Alto GUI.

https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influe...

Lisa attracted a lot of interest, but was outrageously expensive (~$50K in 2025 dollars) as well as being slow. The Mac in its final form is best regarded as a cheaper performant Lisa.

Three things to add:

1. Neither the Lisa nor Mac "copied" the Alto. They took inspiration, but again, the Lisa project began before the team ever visited Xerox. These ideas were in the air in SV, but no one had figured out how to commercialize it. Sort of like conversational UI circa 2015.

2. The Mac was more than a warmed-over Lisa. If you use both, you'll see how much more polished and complete the Mac is.

3. The Mac was a product where the price point really mattered, and was part of the product identity. You can't have "the computer for the rest of us" at the Lisa's price point. Getting that retail price down required a ton of ingenious software and hardware engineering, which was driven forward relentlessly by Jobs.

Lmao right!? Dude stole all that from Xerox and MS came out with palm pilots early 2000s then you had black berry. Amazing how many people think CEOs actually did the work they get credit for when they almost virtually all were in the right spot with the right people. Notice none of them can reproduce or start another ultra successful startup… Zuckerberg is a perfect example of one hit wonder and he wasn’t even the first to create social sites.. You had MySpace and a ton of others..

Palm Pilots and Blackberrys existed before the iPhone, so why don't they exist anymore? Why are their founders historical side notes?

Because they didn't usher in the smartphone revolution. They just weren't good enough for the mass market. Palm was a great early start, but so was Apple's Newton.

So yes, the idea of a smartphone and some of the components existed before the iPhone, but nothing was "stolen." Jobs was the one who first crystalized the smartphone as we know it now. And yes, he used a team, because CEOs don't literally do all of the work of the company.

Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone.

Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use.

The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4

The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.

The smartphone is nothing more than a merge of a traditional cell phone (what we now call "feature phone") and a PDA. Such a merge would happen sooner or later, either with PDAs acquiring the ability to also act as cell phones, or with cell phones gaining the ability to also act as PDAs. Apple might have accelerated that change, but it was inevitable.

I don't think that framing really gives enough credit to how novel the iPhone was, and how it shook up the market when it was introduced.

Yes, PDAs had already been a thing for a long time (Psion Organizer), and Apple themselves had experimented with this category too with the Newton, before the Palm Pilot then became so dominant.

What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box. The large touch screen, with gesture-based UI, was also quite novel, and a large part of what made it successful and generic.

It's easy to look in the rear view mirror and say that most inventions/innovations were inevitable and just a product of their times, but the iPhone was quite shocking when first launched and did shake up the industry - nobody was expecting it, or expecting how popular such a device would be. Steve Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone after it's launch and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).. and then of course went on to try unsuccessfully to copy it.

> What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box.

I used a Palm PDA back in the pre-iPhone days. Its functionality was not "limited to what you got out of the box", you could install applications on it. I have fond memories of exchanging Palm applications with my friends through its infrared port. I used it as a PDA, MP3 player, camera, to play games, and even as a handheld web browser (it didn't come with a web browser, it was one of the applications I installed), using a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone for the network access. The only thing it couldn't do, was making phone calls; for that, I used that cell phone on my other pocket. That's the defining characteristic of a smartphone: being a phone which can do all the things a PDA could already do.

> and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).

That Palm PDA also lacked a keyboard. It was designed to be used without a keyboard, and worked pretty well, with either the stylus or the on-screen keyboard (which was usable even without the stylus). So it was not a given that the lack of a keyboard would be a deficit.

You're completely discounting quality of execution, which in this case is everything. It's the whole ballgame.

I had friends who were Palm Treo die-hards, and they dropped them unceremoniously in 2008 when they used an iPhone for the first time. They were already used to carrying around a phone that could do email and access the internet. But the qualitative jump to the iPhone was so big that it upended the industry and became quite literally the most successful consumer product of all time. If you can't see how that's different from Palm, I don't know what to tell you.

> You're completely discounting quality of execution, which in this case is everything. It's the whole ballgame.

Yes, the iPhone excelled on so many levels, from the hardware level sleek design, screen (game changer really - high resolution color, with multi-point touch support), camera, but also all of the individual functionalities. This wasn't an incremental advance or a case of adding one or two new capabilities to what a Palm could do - this was next-level across the board.

The design of iOS, including the gesture/touch based UI, and level of performance was also key, and it took Android a LONG time to catch up. Microsoft made a misguided attempt with Windows Phone, and others like Nokia and Palm were just left in the dust. We did get Qt from Nokia as a side effect, which was a plus!

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.

The Metaverse was more about virtual reality than AR .. a virtual place where remote teams would work and business meetings be held etc, and as such seems to be a complete flop. This is just not how remote teams want to work. Superior VR googles are of course used for gaming too.

AR seems to be mostly a solution, or technology, looking for a problem. It's a bit like envisioning a future full of flying cars, or humanoid robots walking among us, or even wired picture phones (World Fair 1964). Just because you can, doesn't mean you will have "product market fit" and that people will find a use or want to use what you have built.

Maybe AR will find niche professional or entertainment uses (cf Segway) - could imagine using them in a museum or on a guided tourist tour, perhaps.

It's funny that Zuck as creator of FaceBook, seems to misjudge human nature so badly in the case of Metaverse or mass-adoption smart glasses AR. It seems he maybe just got lucky that his college dating app grew into something much larger and more successful, although he does seem quite competent as a CEO, just not as the serial entrepreneur he seems to fancy himself as.

Zuckerberg is one of the reasons I think AI is a bubble and overhyped. He lacks vision. Remember when they renamed the company Meta and the metaverse was the whole future of the company?

This is the same thing. It is the new shiny tech demo that is really cool. And technically works really, really well and has some real uses, but that doesn’t make a multi billion dollar business.

Can you blame him ?

Facebook is a sewer (like all of internet to some extent); Instagram is a teenage depression-inducing drug; and Whatsapp is sufficiently important that it can't be monetized to destruction.

I'm surprised Meta is valued like Google, and not like HP or some other has-been, given that it's running on the spamming crummy ads towards lonely boomers and divorced millenials.

The only bright-spot is their AI lab with Yann and the PyTorch team.

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.

> 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.

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.

You can say the same about any set of 100 people.

Can you say the same about the top 100 basketball players?

I think it would be about the same, to be honest. There is always someone who is 90% as good as Stephen Curry and we'll rescale our expectations to match.

Absolutely. There are tons of young talented players who just need room to shine

I think sports is even more susceptible to the influence of capital.

Athletes need the following:

- talent/potential - ability (talent that has been realized) - work ethic - luck (could be something as simple as avoiding injuries, supportive family / friends / guardians, etc.)

That will usually get you on the radar. You'll be identified by your coach, talent agents, etc.

Once you cross a certain threshold, usually by the time you've been picked out by talent agents / joined a youth academy, and signed for a sports club with the financial means, you get access to a whole infrastructure that has one goal, and one goal only: To unlock your full potential, and make you the best athlete you can be.

And it is not that unsimilar to how AI researchers are brought up. If you look at pretty much any of the top AI talent, they have the following pedigree:

Very gifted HS students that went to feeder schools / academies, and / or participated in some STEM Olympiad -> Prestigious universities or some top ranking schools in their field -> Well-funded and prestigious research group -> top internships and post-grad employment (or they dropped out to join/found a startup)

You could be the smartest researcher in the world, but if you're stuck at some dinky school with zero budget, and can't (or don't get the change to) relocate, you're going to be stuck at the B/C/D-league.

Hmmmm, I think only assuming those 100 have not been accurately identified. In pretty much all fields I am familiar with, the ability distribution seems to approximate a power law near the top: the gap between the best and the 20th best can be absolutely gigantic.

(And while there are certainly those who could have been the best who did not have the opportunity to succeed, or just didn't actually want to pursue it, I think usually this is way at the edges, i.e. removing the top would not make room for these people, because they're probably not even on anyone's radar at all, like the 'Einstein toiling in a field')

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.

All you need is to publish a couple of right papers and/or significantly contribute to a couple of right projects. If you have brains for that you’ll be noticed.

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but now with AI researchers.

It has nothing to do with Meta's social media business. Zuckerberg, like many other top tech executives, has concluded AGI/ASI is in striking distance. If he could somehow win the race, he becomes god (or so he thinks, anyway). And from the perspective of a man whose idol is Julius Caesar, what wouldn't you spend for that chance?

This seems like it lands in the "most uncharitable" side of the "guess why someone is doing something I don't understand" spectrum. My razors tell me this is usually not the most plausible answer.

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.

Anyone can be worth anything, as long as there’s someone willing to pay.

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.

I'm sure a very small number of these AI researchers will be worth the pay (and then some), but I imagine the marjority of them will only manage to make marginal gains in the projects they work on. I guess it's a little like venture capital, where the majority of the startups that you fund end up flopping, but a small number of them provide returns that make up for all of the losses.

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 €220M)?

There is hope for humanity.

Jokes aside, how and why?

How: Meta has the money because they presumably have infinite margins.

Why: Its a bubble.

Why: Zuck knows exactly one trick, and that is to throw money at a problem.

I don't know what the current tally on his metaverse fiasco is, but if he can spend billions upon billions on that, then poaching AI researchers and engineers for a fraction of that isn't really out of character.

At least part of is is that the capex for LLM training is so high. It used to be that compute was extremely cheap compared to staff, but that's no longer the case for large model training.

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.

For this one, it appears to be something along the lines of $250M in RSUs vesting over 4 years with $100M of it in the first year (almost a seed round per week!)

I suppose I’d rather hire 250 bright kids with $1 million package each instead, but I suppose it gets pr.

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.

> 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.

Ph.D. dropout.

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.

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.

You can easily hire 250 people with doctorates in LLMs if you’re willing to pay $1M salaries. But they are not going to be like this guy.

The 250:1 substitution doesn't work because breakthrough AI research follows power law distributions where top researchers produce orders of magnitude more value through novel insights that can't be replicated by simply adding more average contributors.

Would you get 250 William Ginter Riva’s or 1 Tony Stark?

https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/William_Gint...

They're being paid to not do their own startup and become competition.

Not sure if that's really smart.

With $250M they can easily buy their own competitive AI compute rig ...

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.

Based on the productivity gains in the last 50 years, there are certainly engineers worth $100,000,000 that had no idea the impact they were going to have on the world.

We are in a time where the impact can be measured more quickly, so good for the engineers taking advantage of this.

If Linus Torvalds got paid based on his impact on the world he might just be the world's richest man

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.

When the crash hits, it will hit hard.

These big winners could retire their entire social circle.

Presumably this is a sign that Zuck has brought forward his estimate of (at least some significant step towards) AGI? Feels like we’re missing several novelties on that critical path. I would have thought you’d do better casting a wider, more diverse net if you have money to burn.

It's almost certain these pay packages aren't being negotiated, but are instead ways for players (e.g., sama) to keep their talent from leaving their current positions.

Oh, you got a $8M offer from Meta? That's it? Interesting... They're offering Jane $250M.

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.

How can anyone still believe the AGI scam

If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.

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.

The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress

https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...

>One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors.

>In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027.

>In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 (and definitely by 2024).

>Most of their other estimates declined significantly between 2023 and 2022.

>The median estimate for achieving ‘high-level machine intelligence’ shortened by 13 years.

Basically every median timeline estimate has shrunk like clockwork every year. Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents. I think is reasonable to expect that the pace of "prediction error" won't change significantly since it's been on a straight downward trend over the past 4 years, and if it continues as such, AGI around 2028-2030 is a median estimate.

Those are differences of magnitude, AGI is a difference of kind.

No amount of describing pictures in natural language is AGI.

I never said it was sufficient for AGI, just that it was a milestone in AI that people thought was farther off than it turned out to be. This is applying to all subsets of intelligence AI is reaching earlier than experts initially predicted, giving good reason AGI (perhaps a synthesis of these elements coming together in a single model, or a suite of models) is likely closer than standard expert consensus.

The milestones your citing are all milestones of transformers that were underestimated.

If you think an incremental improvement in transformers are what's needed for AGI, I see your angle. However, IMO, transformers haven't shown any evidence of that capability. I see no reason to believe that they'd develop that with a bit more compute or a bit more data.

It's also worth pointing out that in the same survey it was well agreed upon that success would come sooner if there was more funding. The question was a counterfactual prediction of how much less progress would be made if there was 50% less funding. The response was about 50% less progress.

So honestly, it doesn't seem like many of the predictions are that far off with this in context. That things sped up as funding did too? That was part of the prediction! The other big player here was falling cost of compute. There was pretty strong agreement that if compute was 50% more expensive that this would result in a decrease in progress by >50%.

I think uncontextualized, the predictions don't seem that inaccurate. They're reasonably close. Contextualized, they seem pretty accurate.

Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.

Remember when he said nanobots would cure all our diseases by a few years ago?

I don’t actually, did he specify a year? He made a lot of predictions, many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.

2020s was my understanding; he made this prediction around the time that he made the AGI one. I think he has recently pushed it back to 2030s because it seems unlikely to come true.

  > many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.

If you make enough predictions eventually one will be right

Or at least one will be exciting

  > The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress

What's your argument?

That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions?

Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction?

Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there is a thing as "more accurate" right?

  >> In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027.

Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 < 2027.

And just look at the line that follows

  > In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023

Something doesn't add up here... My guess, as someone who literally took that survey, is what's being referred to as "a simple program" has a different threshold.

Here's the actual question from the survey

  Write concise, efficient, human-readable Python code to implement simple algorithms like quicksort. That is, the system should write code that sorts a list, rather than just being able to sort lists.
  
  Suppose the system is given only:
    A specification of what counts as a sorted list
    Several examples of lists undergoing sorting by quicksort

Is the answer to this question clear? Place your bets now!

Here, I asked ChatGPT the question[1], it got it wrong. Yeah, I know it isn't very wrong, but it is still wrong. Here's an example of a correct solution[2] which shows the (at least) two missing lines. Can we get there with another iteration? Sure! But that's not what the question was asking.

I'm sure some people will say that GPT gave the right solution. So what that it ignored the case of a singular array and assumed all inputs are arrays. I didn't give it an example of a singular array or non-array inputs, but it did just assume. I mean leetcode questions pull out way more edge cases than I'm griping on here.

So maybe you're just cherry-picking. Maybe the author is just cherry-picking. Because their assertion that "AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023" is not unobjectively true. It's not clear that this is true in 2025!

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0da...

[2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-inse...

>Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 < 2027.

The graph you're looking at is of the 2023 survey, not the 2022 one

As for your question, I don't see what it proves. You described the desired conditions for an a sorting algorithm and chatGPT implemented a sorting algorithm. In the case of an array with one element, it bypasses the for loop automatically and just returns the array. It is reasonable for it to assume all inputs are arrays because your question told it that its requirements were to create a program that " turn any list of numbers into a foobar."

Of course I'm not any one of the researchers asked about their predictions in the survey, but I'm sure if you told them "a SOTA AI in 2025 produced working human readable code based on a list of specifications, and is only incorrect by a broad characterization of what counts as an edge case that would trip up a reasonable human coder on the first try", I'm sure the 2022 or 2023 respondents would say that it meets their criteria for their threshold.

  > As for your question, I don't see what it proves.

The author made a claim

I showed the claim was false

The author bases his argument on this and similar claims. Showing his claim is false says he's argument doesn't hold

  > and is only incorrect by a broad characterization

I don't know of I'd really call a single item an "edge case" so much as generalization.

But I do know I'd answer that question differently given your reframing.

> "Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents."

Claim doesn't check out; here's a YouTube video from Apple uploaded in 2021, explaining how to enable and use the iPhone feature to speak a high level human description of what the camera is pointed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY

Even if we spent 1 million years on LLM it will not result in AGI, we are no closer to AGI with LLM technology than we were with toaster technology

“Would you like a toasted teacake?”

Paying attention to trends is how you lose your money on a hype train.

I can't believe this is so unpopular here. Maybe it's the tone, but come on, how do people rationally extrapolate from LLMs or even large multimodal generative models to "general intelligence"? Sure, they might do a better job than the average person on a range of tasks, but they're always prone to funny failures pretty much by design (train vs test distribution mismatch). They might combine data in interesting ways you hadn't thought of; that doesn't mean you can actually rely on them in the way you do on a truly intelligent human.

I think it’s selection bias - a y-combinator forum is going to have a larger percentage of people who are techno-utopianists than general society, and there will be many seeking financial success by connecting with a trend at the right moment. It seems obvious to me that LLMs are interesting but not revolutionary, and equally obvious that they aren’t heading for any kind of “general intelligence”. They’re good at pretending, and only good at that to the extent that they can mine what has already been expressed.

I suppose some are genuine materialists who think that ultimately that is all we are as humans, just a reconstitution of what has come before. I think we’re much more complicated than that.

LLMs are like the myth of Narcissus and hypnotically reflect our own humanity back at us.

My hope is that we can at least get a Civ game with a competent AI...

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.

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.

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?

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).

Source: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+ packages

They are IC roles for the most part

Are you aware of the terms of such offers?

I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially contingent upon achieving certain milestones.

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

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.

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.

Any idea roughly how many $100M offers have been made. I initially thought that there were maybe 1-2 such offers and the remaining were maybe around $10-25M. However, judging by this particular case and another report where a $1.5B offer was made to a someone at Thinking Machines, I think that the actual number of such offers is much higher.

Any idea if the Googles/Apples are offering similar retention grants to prevent key employees from leaving?

murati was offered 1B by meta apparently

Ilya was offered 32B

I love basketball, soccer, and tennis… but you guys have no idea how powerful I have found to share stories like this with my young kids.

Yes, I want them to excel in sports, but these articles provide a crucial counterweight to the all-too-common narrative that becoming a pro athlete is the ultimate dream. Instead, these stories show that being exceptional in STEM isn’t just something you do because you are curious, you find it interesting, you enjoy it (all great motivators), or to please parents and teachers (generally, probably, lesser quality motivators): these stories show that being exceptional in STEM can open doors to exciting, high-impact careers.

It’s been amazing to watch my kids begin to reframe STEM not as the “sensible” thing to do, but as something genuinely cool, aspirational, and full of opportunity.

You can have an exciting, high impact career without being paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

My mental model is looking at all of these situations as pre-emptive aquihires.

Meta can make 40 of these hires (over a number of years) and still be in a better place than feeling like they have to make a single $10B acquisition (if they could even make it at that point)

Even if what you say is true, people don't add in this way. They still need to be managed, motivated, and somehow made to work together toward something of value.

Microsoft Research had hundreds of big brains for decades that all worked independently and added little of value to the business.

If you think of it, what is Meta going to do with AI? Their business model is ads. Maybe AI can improve ads some. For Meta, how does the billions spent on AI impact their bottom line? The reality is that if AI training requirements keep scaling based on Chinchilla scaling, there is going to be massive consolidation in training due to the scale that’s going to be required. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with Zuck running nuclear reactors. Already AI models are the fastest depreciating assets ever created. Moreover Meta is behind the AI curve so they are desperate to catch up. But desperate for what?

Meanwhile I'm not sure that training myself to do ai would increase my odds of getting a job

Probably not. Definitely not if live outside of the USA.

Without access to hardware, you don't do much.

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.

What are the actual data on this now? A lot of people I know could be doing AI and I don't think there is that much special in the experience but yes a few years of correct experience matters I suppose. But it does seem bizarre ... Is buying a chance at improving by months of time currently worth billions? Maybe.

It just seems very short cited right now.

Or should I and my friends all be targeting 7-8 figure jobs?

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?

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."

This is one of those comments that is enjoyably cynical…and conceivably accurate.

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.

You need to be a someone who has a high chance of creating an AI-centric company.

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.

I am sure people here will disagree with me, but I do not think that the 250M$ packages makes sense. In my opinion nobody is is worth 1000s times more the other people in the same field. A way to deal with this is through the tax system that would make it economically inefficient to have insane pay packages. Obviously that will not happen (especially in the US).

All you did was offer your arbitrary opinion without any supporting argument or anecdotal evidence and suggested we should fix it with more taxes.

If you're going to offer an opinion contrary to the majority, you should at least have a convincing argument why.

Why not put people in gulag? Ultimate democratization means. A plate of chow for everyone.

The amount of egg that will need to be removed from faces if AGI turns out to be a pipe dream is going to be unbelievable.

How are these pay packages structured? If Meta stock is flat for the next 10 years (like microsoft from 2001-2011) do these guys walk away with a bunch of worthless options? I have to imagine it's not pure cash wired to their Wells Fargo checking account.

Public companies do restricted stock units, not options to buy illiquid stock. Every N months another chunk becomes available to sell (and M% of it immediately evaporates as income tax).

How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.

Get a PhD in a related field like math or computer science.

And have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge of AI research.

actually applied math or statistics.

it also helps if you happen to know a bunch of openai trade secrets.

That is unfortunately far from enough. The majority end up doing ok but nowhere near this much money.

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.

These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.

Hahaha well you got me there. They are earning it.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

It's interesting the kind of Hail Mary pass they are throwing here when they already have Yann LeCun...

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.

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.

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.

aww, they can't be sleazy CEO types who "make number go up" for 2-3 years and leave with a golden parachute?

No, it’s a 24-year old:

https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lur...

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.

Or it might go up.

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

it's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a lot in the system. I mean debt

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.

Why aren’t they smarter than others?

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.

I guess there’s a lot of loaded language it’s not really worth debating. But I would never claim they’re ALL smarter than EVERYONE else.

But I would expect them to be smart and have relevant experience that everyone else doesn’t have, and I expect the companies offering these salaries aren’t doing it for fun but because they believe their IP or ability to generate IP is very hard to come by, and it’s better to monopolize that talent than let competitors do so. If they could hire 10 people equally as good for 1/10 the price then they would do so. But I’m sure there’s also a large dose of gambling too; even in sports highly anticipated freshman drafts can turn into duds.

> If they could hire 10 people equally as good for 1/10 the price then they would do so.

I think this is where the misunderstanding is. In this context it is not 10 times as much in salary - where it is already highly improbable that a single person provides 10 times as much value as 10 other highly motivated candidates.

You have to increase by orders of magnitude.

Remember that these threads exists in the context of the posted article.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe it's the legacy capitalists that are really something else?

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.

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)

> However - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will continue to improve...

Based on what precedent?

The current trend of continual improvement of LLM coding ability to solve previously unseen problems, handle larger codebases, operate for longer periods of time, and improved agentic scaffolding.

The reward-verifier compatability of programming and RL.

Do you have a stronger precedent for that not being the case?

Is it your view that the improvements have been accelerating or constant?

In my view, improvements have been becoming both less frequent and less impressive.

Accelerating. Below is a list of the SOTA's over time (with some slight wiggle room between similar era models)

gpt4 | 3/2023

gpt4-turbo - 11/2023

opus3 | 3/2024

gpt4o | 5/2024

sonnet3.5 | 6/2024

o1-preview | 9/2024

o1 | 12/2024

o3-minihigh | 1/2025

gemini2pro | 2/2025

o3 | 4/2025

gemini2.5pro | 4/2025

opus4 | 5/2025

??? | 8/2025

This is also not to mention the miniaturization and democratization of intelligence that is the smaller models which has also been impressive.

Id say this shows that improvements are becoming more frequent.

---

Each wave of models was a significant step above what came previously. One needs only to step back a generation to be reminded of the intelligence differential.

Some notable differences have been with o3mh and gemini2.5's ability to spit out 1-3k loc(lines of code) with accurate alterations (most of the time). Though better prompting should be used to not do this in general, the ability is impressive.

Context length with gemini 2.5 pro's intelligence is incredible. To load 20k+ loc of a project and recieve a targeted code change that implements a perfect update is ridiculous.

The amount of dropped imports and improper syntax has dramatically reduced.

I'd say this shows improvements are becoming more impressive.

---

Also note the timespan.

We are only 25 months into the explosion kicked off by GPT-4.

We are only 12 months into the reasoning paradigm.

We have barely scratched the surface of agentic tooling and scaffolding.

There are countless architectural improvements and alternatives in development and research.

Infrastructure buildouts and compute scaling are also chugging along, allowing faster training, faster inference, faster testing, etc. etc.

---

This all paints a picture of an acceleration in time and depth of capability

You claim to believe in scientific theory and not magic, but you are asserting many things without evidence.

If you want to be more specific I'd be happy to supply evidence for any assertions I made

what does Meta hiring have to do with a crash? if anything it shows increase because of the amount of investment put into it.

Where would put their money into though? It’s such a weird economy, especially with the expected decrease in younger population.

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.

European defense stocks seem like a pretty good bet right now.

Unfortunately "defense" almost always seems like a good bet

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> It is about to crash, harder than ever.

and then immediately bounce back to higher than it was before

I recall a time where a post doc spent in graph theory ML was the worst career choice for students. Make sure you get paid in cash. =3

Basically an anti trust loophole - why but a company and face regulations when you can buy the people?

If these people are making that much, I wonder what is the compensation for people like LeCunn.

But did they remember to mention pre-planned vacation dates? Maybe not so smart after all.

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.

We should take all the money away from Petey T and the treason bunch, then.

What am I doing with my life...

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.

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

this is the nature of capitalism, capital begets more capital and the returns are exponential, however our societies, economies, and tax systems remain linear. We never really adjusted because it's complicated.

To me it's obvious that these extremes create perverse incentives, so the people who will take those jobs won't amount to much. I m willing to bet that Meta's AI efforts are doomed from now on.

Money itself amounts to a lot. At $250M you're already able to influence elections. So we might expect American politics for the rest of the 2020s to be broadly accelerationist and pro Big Token, even more so than it is currently. SV being the keystone of growth in America means SV ideals will have massive power in Washington.

my sibling is an AI researcher at Apple. He still flies Frontier airlines.

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.

GenAI Bubble.

Just like few years ago “blockchain contract auditors”, and before that “big data bla bla”, and before that “cybersecurity xyz”, you always have people who try to grift as much as possible from the ${current bubble}.

#jokeAhead #beCareful

Such a big salary for a non-management position! Things are getting really wrong in this iteration of the US ultraliberalism.

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.

What a sensationalized article. NY Times should be embarrassed for publishing this drivel. One superstar researcher does not equate an industry. Perhaps NY Times should consider paying its journalists the same wage as Pulitzer prize winners.

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.

When will the bubble pop?

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.

Eventually people might consider that just maybe... it's not a bubble...

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.

2000 was a bubble, and yet the internet continued to eat the world after it popped. I expect we'll see something similar

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.

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.

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.

> I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a lot of the time.

To highlight the inverse: If someone truly has an "AGI" system (the acronym the goalposts have been moved-to) then it wouldn't matter who was wrangling it.

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.

> a story

Yeah, that framing for LLMs is one of my pet-causes: It's document generation, some documents resemble stories with characters, and everything else (e.g. "chatting" with an LLM) is an illusion, albeit an impressive and sometimes-useful one.

Being able to generate a document where humans perceive plausible statements from Santa Claus does not mean Santa Claus now lives inside the electronic box, that flying sleighs are real, etc. The principle still holds even if the character is described as "an intelligent AI assistant named [Product Name]".

I don't understand your comment. If I phrase it in the terms of your document view I'm trying to say in my comment is that even though the models can generate some documents (computer programs, answers to questions) they are terrible at generating others, such as stories.

I'm underlining that "it's a story, not a conversation" is indeed the direction we need to think in when discussing these systems, where an additional step along that direction is "it's a document which humans can perceive as a story." That's the level on which we need to engage with the problem, asking what features of a document seem wrong to us and why it might have been iteratively constructed that way.

In the opposite direction, people (understandably) fall for the illusion, and start operating under the assumption that they are "talking to" some kind of persistent entity which is capable of having goals, beliefs, or personality traits. Voodoo debugging.

“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.

This is my exact take to a tee and also the exact take of Peter Norvig!!!!

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

That's a lot of confidence that this is a bubble rather than an existential race. Maybe you're making bank betting that view?

Not sure what you mean but if I was to invest I would have invested years ago in NVIDIA.

Given that $5k in nVidia in 2015 when their stock was trading at $0.75/share would be $1.1M today at $173.72/share, that's very principled of you to have the winning pick ready, and not do it.

Well seeing as I didn’t have the money back then sure

2027

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.

When we are seeing down rounds on OpenAI. OpenAI is currently valued at 300B.

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.

and what exactly is this "whiz" kid capable of doing that you and I cant

I have a feeling you’re missing this question:

and what exactly did this "whiz" kid do that you and I didn’t

If you need to ask this question – most likely he can do far more than you can ever do.

At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765193 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)

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.

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”.

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.

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

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.

> the problem of government can be solved with enough money

Tokyo Professor and former Beijing Billionaire CEO Jack Ma, may disagree.

You're right that the CCP is a major obstacle to a truly globalized kleptocracy.

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.

I was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a game.

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.

Is that friend Josh Kopelman?

Capitalism is about to break. The revolution is coming.

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.)

Revolution of who, exactly?

HN shows this as google.com, but the link is directly to nytimes.com. Bug?

The link is a google.com redirect. You probably have an extension installed that auto-resolves such redirects.

It's a redirect.

We updated the link to its redirect URL.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

It’s all a bit depressing that we have the ability to do so much as a species but we don’t work together.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

> man I'm so sorry for you.

I feel sorry for you. I guess we can share our feeling sorry for each other in common.

> You just write long BS for you bias.

Careful now, your bias is showing.

> Have a good day

Every day is a great day with the money i've made off TSLA lately :) Thanks Elon!

Little of what you mention was evident before 2014.

> Little of what you mention was evident before 2014.

I was responding to a parent that said "since that time."

Even if I had not been, it just serves to validate that with each passing year I have been given only more reasosn to think the things I did in 2014, today.

"In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.

We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

"Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990. In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm

Thats only 25M in 2025 dollars.

Still not enough to afford the house I grew up in in San Jose.

cant wait for him to come out with his own energy drink

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yea because everyone knows CEOs just take credit for the work the real engineers and others do… I’d far prefer researchers or developers getting this kind of money instead of a CEO…

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.

you just described how it is the same thing

Yeah, I forgot a "not" leading to...

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.

I know. For God sakes who will think of the poor billionaires for once! /saracasm

You are doing it again.

How exactly does one guy making a billion dollars help the lower class?

It reinforces meritocracy. What’s the alternative?

Why not have the best person get all the money?

If he provides a good service he probably deserves it. Your next question is probably either “if one person has all the money, who has money remaining to spend” or “inequality is bad” (if you have given it more thought).

To either question the answer is: current monetary system doesn’t allow this to happen and inequality is okay as long as the floor is increasing for everyone (to an extent).

Zucc giving 1B to a relatively unknown researcher is the redistribution that people a should be in favour of. Just that it’s not redistribution to them.

The bigger picture is that this investment is towards furthering good LLM research which will again benefit everyone. This transaction seems to be good in all angles.

Yes, but I don't think that one guy getting a billion dollars increases the floor.

it is part of the mechanism that increases the floor. the existence of Meta, Apple and Amazon led to billionaires but were crucial to increasing the floor.

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.

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.

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?

What really, private industry pays top performing individuals more than the government ever did?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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