211–220 of 575 posts
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?
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. $5…
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.
“Our Rock Stars Aren't Like Your Rock Stars”
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're being paid to not do their own startup and become competition.
With $250M they can easily buy their own competitive AI compute rig ...
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, musicia…
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.
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 ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
But feel free to prove me wrong - I am ammendable.
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. $5…
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…
- He's on track to becoming 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 PhDs never get there.
- 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.
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