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

nytimes.com

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

#221

Post by mi_lk »

apparent wrote: post #208

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…

> 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

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

#222

Post by atleastoptimal »

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.

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

#223

Post by peterlk »

cm2187 wrote: post #201
BSOhealth wrote: post #111

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…

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.

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

#224

Post by apparent »

mi_lk wrote: post #221
apparent wrote: post #208

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…

> 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.

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

#225

Post by prewett »

meekaaku wrote: post #46

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.

I'm going with envy. Athletics is a completely different skill from software, and one that is looked down on by posters here, judging by the frequent use of "sportsball". "Sportsball" players make huge salaries? Whatever, not my thing, that's for normies. But when software researchers make 1000x my salary? Now it's more personal. Surely they are not 1000x as good as me. It seems unlikely that this guy is 1000x as skilled as the average senior developer, so there's some perceived unfairness, too.

But I counsel a different perspective: it's quite remunerative to be selling tulips when there's a mania on!

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

#226

Post by perks_12 »

BSOhealth wrote: post #111

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…

I can print jersey with Neymars name on it and drive revenue. i can't do that with some ai researcher. they have to actually deliver and i don't see how a person with $100M net-worth will do anything other than coast.

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

#227

Post by toddmorey »

apparent wrote: post #208

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…

I don’t see a winner takes all moat forming. If anything, the model providers are almost hot-swappable. And it seems the lifespan for being the best SOTA model is now measured in weeks.

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

#228

Post by robbomacrae »

akomtu wrote: post #211
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #162

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?

You need to be a someone who has a high chance of creating an AI-centric company.

Alright you twisted my arm im in. Already did a couple AI centric projects. HMU let's do this. Personally I want a bazaar for AI. not sure I like the future being decided by the current crop of billionaires.

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

#229

Post by jjmarr »

apparent wrote: post #208

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…

The actual OpenRouter data says otherwise.[1] Right now, Google leads with only 28.4% marketshare. Anthropic (24.7%), Deepseek (15.4%), and Qwen (10.8%) are the runners-up.

If this were winner-take-all market with low switching costs, we'd be seeing instant majority market domination whenever a new SOTA model comes out every few weeks. But this isn't happening in practice, even though it's much easier to switch models on OpenRouter than many other inference providers.

I get the perception of "winner-take-all" is why the salaries are shooting up, but it's at-odds with the reality.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/rankings

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

#230

Post by decimalenough »

apparent wrote: post #224
mi_lk wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In other words, what matters is not just which one is "best"?
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