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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

#231

Post by esafak »

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

It's multivariate; better for what? None of them are best across the board.

I think what we're seeing here is superstar economics, where the market believes the top players are disproportionately more valuable than average. Typically this is bad, because it leads to low median compensation but in this rare case it is working out.

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

#232

Post by nextworddev »

jjmarr wrote: post #229
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 model…

Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of enterprise adoption

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

#233

Post by jjmarr »

nextworddev wrote: post #232
jjmarr wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 model…

Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of enterprise adoption

Is there good public data on enterprise adoption?

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

#234

Post by cadamsdotcom »

torginus wrote: post #199
TrackerFF wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10% is an enormous amount. Let’s say 1%.

Even if it’s 1% at the scale you’re talking that’s 1B to the company. So still worth it.

Wild.

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

#235

Post by godelski »

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…

What I don't understand is with such small of a gap why this isn't a huge boon for research.

While there's a lot of money going towards research, there's less than there was years ago. There's been a shift towards engineering research and ML Engineer hiring. Fewer positions for lower level research than there were just a few years ago. I'm not saying don't do the higher level research, just that it seems weird to not do the lower level when the gap is so small.

I really suspect that the winner is going to be the one that isn't putting speed above all else. Like you said, first to market isn't everything. But if first to market is all the matters then you're also more likely to just be responding to noise in the system. The noisy signal of figuring out what that market is in the first place. It's really easy to get off track with that and lose sight of the actual directions you need to pursue.

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

#237

Post by godelski »

peterlk wrote: post #223
cm2187 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  > There is a group of wealthy individuals who have bought in to the idea that the singularity is months away.
My question is "how many months need to pass until they realize it isn't months away?"

What, it used to be 2025? Then 2027? Now 2030? I know these are not all the same people but there are trends of to keep pushing it back. I guess Elon has been saying full self-driving is a year away since 2016 so maybe this belief can sustain itself for quite some time.

So my second question is: does the expectation of achievements being so close lengthen the time to make such achievements?

I don't think it is insane to think it could. If you think it is really close you'd underestimate the size of certain problems. Claim people are making mountains out of molehills. So you put efforts elsewhere, only to find that those things weren't molehills after all.

Predictions are hard and I think a lot of people confuse critiques with lack of motivation. Some people do find flaws and use them as excuses to claim everything is fruitless. But I think most people that find flaws are doing so in an effort to actually push things forward. I mean isn't that the job of any engineer or scientist? You can't solve problems if you can't identify problems. Triaging and prioritizing problems is a whole other mess, but it is harder to do when you're working at the edge of known knowledge. Little details are often not so little.

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

#238

Post by IshKebab »

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…

Yeah this makes zero sense. Also unlike a pop star or even a footballer who are at least reasonably reliable, AI research is like 95% luck. It's very unlikely that any AI researcher that has had a big breakthrough will have a second one.

Remember capsule networks?

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

#239

Post by godelski »

storus wrote: post #219
cm2187 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

  > given what even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to them.
I think a lot of people have a grave misunderstanding of DeepSeek. The conversation is usually framed comparing to OpenAI. But this would be like comparing how much it cost to make the first iPhone (the literal first working one, not how much each Gen 1 iPhone cost to make) with the cost to make any smartphone a few years later. It's a lot easier and cheaper to make something when you have an example in hand. Just like it is a lot easier to learn Calculus than it is to invent calculus.

Which that framing weirdly undermines DeepSeek's own accomplishments. They did do some impressive stuff. But that's much more technical and less exciting of a story (at least to the average person. It definitely is exciting to other AI researchers).

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

#240

Post by apparent »

decimalenough wrote: post #230
apparent wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

If the Google model was 50% better than OpenAI I would have bought a subscription, which would moot the UX issue. But IME it isn't discernibly better at all, let alone 50% better.
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