$2.5B in stock comp for about 3,000 employees. that’s roughly $830k per person in just six months. Almost 60% of their revenue went straight back to staff.
"The people spreading obvious lies must have a reasonable basis in their lying"?
You’re ignoring my point about the legitimate reason people might be getting offers in this stratosphere. No one has debunked or refuted the general reporting, at least not that I’ve seen. If you have a source, show it please.
I have known several people who have went to OAI and I would firmly say they are 10x engineers, but they are just doing general infra stuff that all large tech companies have to do, so I wouldn’t say they are solving problems that only they can solve and nobody else.
Nobody wants to hear that one dev can be 50x better, but it's obvious that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and not every mind is replaceable.
The United states has tens of millions of skilled and competent and qualified people who can play basketball. 1000 of them get paid to play professionally.
10 of them are paid 9 figures and are incredible enough to be household names to non-basketball fans.
Doesn't it depend upon how you measure the 50x? If hiring five name-brand AI researchers gets you a billion dollars in funding, they're probably each worth 1,000x what I'm worth to the business.
Adding headcount to a fast growing company *to lower wages* is a sure way to kill your culture, lower the overall quality bar and increase communication overheads significantly.
Yes they are paying a lot of their employees and the pool will grow, but adding bodies to a team that is running well in hopes that it will automatically lead to a bump in productivity is the part that is insane. It never works.
What will happen is a completely new team (team B) will be formed and given ownership of a component that was previously owned by team A under the guise of "we will just agree on interfaces". Team B will start doing their thing and meeting with Team A representative regularly but integration issues will still arise, except that instead of a tight core of 10-20 developers, you now have 40. They will add a ticketing to track change better, now issues in Team's B service, which could have been addressed in an hour by the right engineer on team A, will take 3 days to get resolved as ticket get triaged/prioritized. Lo and behold, Team C as now appeared and will be owning a sub-component of Team B. Now when Team A has issue with Team B's service, they cut a ticket, but the oncall on Team B investigates and finds that it's actually an issue with Team C's service, they cut their own ticket.
Suddenly every little issue takes days and weeks to get resolved because the original core of 10-20 developers is no longer empowered to just move fast. They eventually leave because they feel like their impact and influence has diminished (Team C's manager is very good at politics), Team A is hollowed out and you now have wall-to-wall mediocrity with 120 headcounts and nothing is ever anyone's fault.
I had a director that always repeated that communication between N people is inherently N² and thus hiring should always weight in that the candidate being "good" is not enough, they have to pull their weight and make up for the communication overhead that they add to the team.
I'm glad if US and Chinese investors will bleed trillions on AI, just to find out few of your seniors can leave and found their own company and are at your level minus some months of progress.
In any case the talent is very scarce in AI/ML, the one able to push through good ideas so prices are going to be high for years.
There's always individuals, developers or not, whose impact is 50 times greater than the average.
And the impact is measured financially, meaning, how much money you make.
If I find a way to solve an issue in a warehouse sparing the company from having to hire 70 people (that's not a made up number but a real example I've seen), your impact is in the multiple millions, the guy being tasked with delivering tables from some backoffice in the same company is obviously returning fractions of the same productivity.
Salvatore Sanfilippo, the author of Redis, alone, built a database that killed companies with hundreds of (brilliant) engineers.
Approaching the problems differently allowed him to scale to levels that huge teams could not, and the impact on $ was enormous.
Not only that but you can have negative x engineers. Those that create plenty of work, gaslighting and creating issues and slowing entire teams and organizations.
If you don't believe in NX developers or individuals that's a you problem, they exist in sports or any other field where single individuals can have impact hundreds of thousands or millions of times more positive than the average one.
Of course different scientists with different backgrounds, professionalism, communication and leadership skills are going to have magnitude of orders different outputs and impacts in AI companies.
If you put me and Carmack in a game development team you can rest assured that he's going to have a 50/100x impact over me, not sure why would I even question it.
Not only his output will be vastly superior than mine, but his design choices, leadership and experience will save and compound infinite amounts of money and time. That's beyond obvious.
As for your various anecdotes later, I offer the counter observation that nobody is going around talking about 50x lottery winners, despite the lifetime earnings on lotteries also showing very wide spread:. Clearly observing a big spread in outcome is insufficient evidence for concluding the spread is due to factors inherent to the participants.
Besides, people are actively being trained up. Some labs are just extending offers to people who score very highly on their conscription IQ tests.
Why would employees stay after getting trained if they have a better offer?
You may lose a few employees to poaching, sure - but the math on the relative cost to hire someone for 100m vs. training a bunch employees and losing a portion of those is pretty strongly in your favor.
While there is some flexibility in how options are issued and accounted for (see FASB - FAS 123), typically industry uses something like a 4 year vesting with 1 year cliffs.
Every accounting firm and company is different, most would normally account for it for entire period upfront the value could change when it is vests, and exercised.
So even if you want to compare it to revenue, then it should be bare minimum with the revenue generated during the entire period say 4 years plus the valuation of the IP created during the tenure of the options.
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[1] Unless the company starts buying back options/stock from employees from its cash reserves, then it is different.
Even secondary sales that OpenAI is being reported to be facilitating for staff worth $6.6Billion has no bearing on its own financials directly, i.e. one third party(new investor) is buying from another third party(employee), company is only facilitating the sales for morale, retention and other HR reasons.
There is secondary impact, as in theory that could be shares the company is selling directly to new investor instead and keeping the cash itself, but it is not spending any existing cash it already has or generating, just forgoing some of the new funds.
1x Person with billions probably gets spent in a way that fucks everyone over.
I don’t work there but know several early folks and I’m absolutely thrilled for them.
employees are very liquid if they want to be, or wait a year for the next 10x in valuation
it’s just selling a few shares for any higher share price
If all goes well, someday it will dilute earnings.
A better way to look at it is they had about $12.1B in expenses. Stock was $2.5B, or roughly 21% of total costs.