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Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me that this is a massive red flag pointing to AI being in a bubble. This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

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.

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It only seems like a bubble if you think this is that much of an outlier. $750k a year for 2 years is a lot, but it's not an outrageous grant rate for technical staff. It's high but not like 10x high. If it was actually a $1.5m bonus like the headline suggests, then that would be crazy.

For senior technical staff, sure, it makes sense.

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.

It probably just implies that the organization is top-heavy and being egalitarian with Saudi money doesn't cost that much in the big picture.

People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

People today still say NVIDIA is overvalued, that the stock price doesn't make sense given their revenue today.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

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.

These things can go on longer than 2 years

> 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.

Despite being oft cited, that’s probably the worst poster child of bubbles by the way

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

Also it may not have been as silly as people make out. The Dutch still have a tulip industry with 2,600 varieties grown over 60,000 acres. It may have been worth spending ~$1m on a bulb if it was superior and you could breed from it and sell a lot.

Another reason it wasn’t silly at all

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

the spending on gpus is completely unsustainable. It looks great for them, but not everyone is going to get a return on that investment.

> NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

Nvidia sells (among other things) performance leading hardware products with a locked-in software ecosystem surrounding them.

OpenAi... doesn't.

To be fair, if those people are right, then NVIDIA's stock price (and revenue) is part of that bubble, so its not really evidence that this isn't a bubble.

Time will tell if they're right or not. But it wouldn't be the first time it has happened.

> People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.

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.

> This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

I mean, Zuckerberg has been having success offering more money so clearly not happy enough.

Honestly this just shows that deepseek and qwen teams werent lieing when they said US per token and training costs were a fucking lie and drastically over priced by the vendors in the US.

> This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.

I mean, a house is probably a nice gift and a good reassurance of future safety if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs.

How do OpenAI employees come out unscathed if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs? Why would OpenAI keep these employees around? Would there even be humans as part of "OpenAI Inc" at that point?

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.

If you have no mortgage, own your home, and have saved enough in investments, even if AGI/ASI materially impairs the labor economy, you are in a far better position than someone who rents, someone with a large mortgage who needs a job for the next 20-30 years, etc assuming rule of law holds up. Free money is free money, to not take it would be silly. Just don't blow it on a Lambo.

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)

If AGI gets invented and the requirement for labor goes away, even if not fully, then all bets are off - the entire economy, everywhere, collapses.

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.

I mean, you need to pay property taxes on that :)

You can do that with a minimum wage job, rental, or heloc

Who are you going to rent to?

People who have jobs AGI can’t do.

Only if said house is in a gated community, secured by a private militia with heavy weaponry.

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