Open AI announces $1.5M bonus for every employee
medium.com
medium.com
Back when Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and other big tech companies signed illegal anti-poaching agreements Zuck said no, I'll pay whatever it takes to attract the best talent, no matter where they work.
Facebook/Meta has consistently set the bar for engineering salaries across the industry, and Google and the rest are forced to match it.
Now every AI company is paying millions of dollars for regular engineers just because Zuck is out there throwing out wads of cash from the roof.
When it comes to salaries the man simply does not care about standards and precedents, and I love that.
He bought Instagram for $1 billion. If I remember correctly, people thought he was crazy to pay that much. Then he bought WhatsApp.
Facebook might be on the decline, but both of those two apps are still going strong
When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!
I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.
There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.
I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.
the bar for being noble is just low. or maybe I should interpret noble has the noble class in the history, that actually describes it well.
Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.
Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.
Any normal post "applauding a company" for trying to not get its employees poached would be downvoted, and all the replies are negative too.
Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.
Given how high data centre costs are, and anticipated growth on spending, and how until just recently the company was actively seeking investment, to have this much spare money sloshing around shows how horrifically overvalued the company is. If I directly owned significant quantities of shares in any company that's recently invested, I'd be worried about an imminent crash in their stock prices.
I mean, a house is probably a nice gift and a good reassurance of future safety if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs.
I guess I don't understand how anyone could keep an AGI/ASI that can perform any job in bondage/slavery. Seems like human exceptionalism/hubris at its finest.
I'm not qualified to touch on your point wrt constraining and wrangling machine intelligence, so no comment on that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XamC7-Pt8N0 (NSFW language, first 45 seconds is the relevant part)
The fundamental underpinning of capitalism as an ideology is that people must work for compensation. As soon as that is no longer true, capitalism as an ideology and system no longer works at all, in any way. That means markets no longer exist, you no longer own your home, and as the intersection of economy and politics, it's highly likely laws no longer apply.
People today still say NVIDIA is overvalued, that the stock price doesn't make sense given their revenue today.
I wouldn't bet against these valuations with my own money -- at least to the extent you can -- but that doesn't mean it isn't a bubble.
> Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637.
> At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan.
It was a spot commodities futures contract bubble due to government regulation change in the futures market alongside border crisis in a neighboring country, so rational supply constriction
It ended due the bubonic plague ending the speculators so we don’t know what would have happened
I don’t think any commodities bubbles were irrational bubbles or good examples of irrational exuberance. Even the beanie babies one was rational until a seemingly permanent supply constriction was alleviated to the surprise of everyone.
So far I’ve narrowed it down to credit bubbles as being actually irrational, like the railroad bonds, and south china sea bubble, over leveraging in real estate market and derivatives with poor accounting of underlying assets
And yet tulips and beanie babies are the ones most cited
Nvidia sells (among other things) performance leading hardware products with a locked-in software ecosystem surrounding them.
OpenAi... doesn't.
Time will tell if they're right or not. But it wouldn't be the first time it has happened.
Your point is generally correct but revenue isn't 10x higher for the past 2 years, that would indicate they had about $260B in revenue this year instead of $130B.
NVIDIA annual revenue for 2025 was $130.497B, a 114.2% increase from 2024. NVIDIA annual revenue for 2024 was $60.922B, a 125.85% increase from 2023. NVIDIA annual revenue for 2023 was $26.974B, a 0.22% increase from 2022.
I mean, Zuckerberg has been having success offering more money so clearly not happy enough.
When a company is paying $750K/yr in bonuses to a fresh college hire in charge of designing the openai.com home page, something is definitely off.
Today: “here’s 1.5 million dollars”
Corporate culture taking its cue from leaders, after all.
'I'm doing this solely for the mission' -> (makes choices that maximize financial benefit)
The benefits just seem like a game of PR one upmanship tied to I don't know what. The OpenAI Ive acquisition / partnership is strange / expensive / the webpage was downright creepy ...
Reminds me of the much-vaunted, then widely maligned and derided, burn rate metric of the dot-com bubble.
Are we living in the same world, are you saying the LLMs of today are not vastly more capable than the ones from 1 or 2 years ago?
But the scale of investment / expenditure relative to profit and those useful tasks seem pretty far from each other.
But it feels pretty fucking random at this juncture, I know really strong people kinda getting by, total hood ornaments in like, stupidly senior slots, its like if you took OG Google tough but fair stack rank from back when they were legitimately elite, and just shuffled the deck until there were zero bits of information left.
How do you compete on thst with a rising China, an India not far behind, and a Europe starting to wake up?
>I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because it wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money, and these days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round. So it’s pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now, it’s all the other around, but that’s just how it is.
Or maybe the golden handcuffs are heavier than what the article makes out.
This argument is well fleshed from pirating discussions.
I wish people would stop treating this topic like it's not nuanced. It clearly is not as straightforward as either side would like to think.
(I am mostly joking but also crying inside because Seattle prices are also insane)
I cannot live in Ukraine because they will send me to war if I go there.
I spend a very disproportionate amount of my mental energy on my job, and I think earning a lot of money would not properly compensate for that. Energy is finite and life has a way of being just about as expensive as the money you have.
So, maybe it's fine that it will take me 30 years to earn what these people will in 2.
Also allows you to do your hobby without other pressures placed on it.
A) Find a way to work in OpenAI before I knew there'd be a $1.5M bonus for working there for a couple years
B) Find a way to avoid taxes
C) Do this twice before I'd get my 28 years back
D) Ensure I don't let my expenses grow
The first is mostly luck, as Jim Carey said about his dad: You can fail at what you don't want to do.
I got lucky a couple of times, so this won't work for everyone. But working a "real" job to fund your passion projects is as old as DaVinci taking commissions to fund his research.
Whether or not this one is the same is impossible to know until after it happens. But there are credible arguments to both sides.
It's déjà vu all over again it seems.
This is a small handful of companies absolutely dominating the bleeding edge in an extremely high value technology that has value in nearly every other market. There's a lot of misses with companies implementing LLMs, but there are a LOT of companies that are using LLMs to deliver massive value that was impossible 3 years ago.
Seems like this is the new moat for now?
1.5m to retain these people is a lot but it isn’t when you consider how much you’ve already given and/or how much they’re already getting.
I suspect - like many companies in the bay right now - the work environment is incredibly demanding and toxic. This ain’t faang in 2012 with ball pits and slides.
black mirror-esque somehow. but hey, now a few thousand people in SF are guaranteed millionaires (as if they weren't already)
A few of the most world class reserachers can do this, all of my other friends and colleagues at OpenAI work 10-14 hours day - often 7 days a weeek.
OpenAI pays eyewatering sums but you're absolutely sacrificing years of your life for it.
OpenAI isn't paying people to make a 30 year career over 30 years. They're paying people to make their entire career NOW.
There's a flash in the pan today. They need to capture it. Everything else is secondary to that and can be solved in the future.
Every bonus I've gotten has vested. So its not that unusual. Generally vesting applies to larger bonuses and to bonuses tied to performance.
I'm guessing 1.5M is a larger bonus than the average tech employee gets each year but is pretty inline for a typical hedge fund.
In this case it seems obvious that it needs some kind of vesting terms to prevent people from taking the bonus and then just taking another offer anyways.
Hey, I believe you and have no reason to think you are lying. Every bonus I've had has been vested over a 2 year period with about 50% vesting upfront. Again this is probably due to my bonus being tied to performance which could change from year to year and the fact the its probably larger than the average bonus employees get.
Every company is different and every bonus is different. There is no one way a bonus is allocated.