Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 575 posts

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

#161

Post by master_crab »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #143
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #112

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 comp…

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.

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

#162

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

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?

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

#163

Post by MichaelZuo »

lores wrote: post #127
MichaelZuo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just want the best, and they’re afraid of having second rates, B-players, etc., causing a bozo explosion. That seems like all the motivation that’s needed. Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?

Just like in football, buying all the best players pretty much guarantees failure as egos and personal styles clash and take precedence over team achievement. The only reasons one would do that are fear, vanity, and stupidity, and those have to be more important than getting value for the extraordinary amounts of money invested.

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).

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

#164

Post by klabb3 »

InterviewFrog wrote: post #114
fidotron wrote: post #78

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.

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…

> 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.

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

#165

Post by AIPedant »

brandall10 wrote: post #157
AIPedant wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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.

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

#166

Post by lossolo »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #113
normie3000 wrote: post #106

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

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

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.

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

#168

Post by Nevermark »

saubeidl wrote: post #122
mathgeek wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

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.)

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

#169

Post by brandall10 »

AIPedant wrote: post #165
brandall10 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#170

Post by dekhn »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #131
lores wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
Post reply on HN