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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

#271

Post by atleastoptimal »

parineum wrote: post #269
atleastoptimal wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be a…

Those are differences of magnitude, AGI is a difference of kind. No amount of describing pictures in natural language is AGI.

I never said it was sufficient for AGI, just that it was a milestone in AI that people thought was farther off than it turned out to be. This is applying to all subsets of intelligence AI is reaching earlier than experts initially predicted, giving good reason AGI (perhaps a synthesis of these elements coming together in a single model, or a suite of models) is likely closer than standard expert consensus.

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

#272

Post by p1esk »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #262
godelski wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.

The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be a…

Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.

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

#275

Post by p1esk »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #3
gedy wrote: post #2

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.

You can easily hire 250 people with doctorates in LLMs if you’re willing to pay $1M salaries. But they are not going to be like this guy.

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

#276

Post by overfeed »

bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #258
SamvitJ wrote: post #220

One way to make sense of this specific case at least. - 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…

I agree on all points. However, if he already had several millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

> Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

Meta will have more AI-compute than he ever hoped to get at his - and most other - startups.

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

#277

Post by parineum »

jatora wrote: post #94
ehnto wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 outcom…

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 blind…

> However - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will continue to improve...

Based on what precedent?

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

#278

Post by overfeed »

godelski wrote: post #237
peterlk wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> My question is "how many months need to pass until they realize it isn't months away?"

It's going to persist until shareholders punish them for it. My guess is it's going to be some near-random-trigger, such as a little-known AI company declaring bankruptcy, but becoming widely reported. Suddenly, investing in AI with no roadmap to profitability will become unfashionable, budget cuts, down-rounds, bankruptcies and consolidation will follow. But there's no telling when this will be, as there's elite convergence to keep the hype going for now.

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

#279

Post by beAbU »

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…

If the next best model is 0.5x as expensive, then many might opt for that in use cases where the results are already good enough.

At work we are optimising cost by switching in different models for different agents based on use case, and where testing has demonstrated a particular model's output is sufficient.

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

#280

Post by parineum »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #271
parineum wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are differences of magnitude, AGI is a difference of kind. No amount of describing pictures in natural language is AGI.

I never said it was sufficient for AGI, just that it was a milestone in AI that people thought was farther off than it turned out to be. This is applying to all subsets of intelligence AI is reaching earlier than experts initially predicted, giving good reason AGI (perhaps a synthesis of these elements coming together in a single model, or a suite of models) is likely closer than standard expert consensus.

The milestones your citing are all milestones of transformers that were underestimated.

If you think an incremental improvement in transformers are what's needed for AGI, I see your angle. However, IMO, transformers haven't shown any evidence of that capability. I see no reason to believe that they'd develop that with a bit more compute or a bit more data.

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