One way to make sense of this specific case at least.
- He's on track to being 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 never reach it.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
My personal negativity stems from Meta in particular having a net negative 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://archive.is/t9HRT
One way to make sense of this specific case at least.
- He's on track to being 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 never reach it.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these global sporting institutions.
How much revenue does Google make in a day? £700m+.
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?
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
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.
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.
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.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but now with AI researchers.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
When the crash hits, it will hit hard.
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.
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.
My personal negativity stems from Meta in particular having a net negative 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
murati was offered 1B by meta apparently
How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.
These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.
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.
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.
actually applied math or statistics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
it's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a lot in the system. I mean debt
> 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.
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.
Or it might go up.
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.
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.
European defense stocks seem like a pretty good bet right now.
Unfortunately "defense" almost always seems like a good bet
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.
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.
> It is about to crash, harder than ever.
and then immediately bounce back to higher than it was before
what does Meta hiring have to do with a crash? if anything it shows increase because of the amount of investment put into it.
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.
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)
Maybe it's the legacy capitalists that are really something else?
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
When will the bubble pop?
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.
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.
“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.
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.
2027
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thats only 25M in 2025 dollars.
Still not enough to afford the house I grew up in in San Jose.
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
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 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?
I was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a game.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
We updated the link to its redirect URL.
It's a redirect.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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 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?
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What really, private industry pays top performing individuals more than the government ever did?