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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

#281

Post by jodrellblank »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #126

Wonder what their contracts look like. Are these people gonna be grinding their ass off at the Meta offices working crazy hours? Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum success? And if so, what does that form of success look like? So far the vision that Zucc has outlined has been rather underwhelming, but maybe the vision which he s…

> "Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum success?"

I suggest we saw a clear demonstration of that with the Metaverse and the answer is no, but more intensely than two letters can communicate.

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

#282

Post by godelski »

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…

  > The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress
What's your argument?

That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions?

Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction?

Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there is a thing as "more accurate" right?

  >> In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027.
Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 And just look at the line that follows

  > In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023
Something doesn't add up here... My guess, as someone who literally took that survey, is what's being referred to as "a simple program" has a different threshold.

Here's the actual question from the survey

  Write concise, efficient, human-readable Python code to implement simple algorithms like quicksort. That is, the system should write code that sorts a list, rather than just being able to sort lists.
  
  Suppose the system is given only:
    A specification of what counts as a sorted list
    Several examples of lists undergoing sorting by quicksort
Is the answer to this question clear? Place your bets now!

Here, I asked ChatGPT the question[1], it got it wrong. Yeah, I know it isn't very wrong, but it is still wrong. Here's an example of a correct solution[2] which shows the (at least) two missing lines. Can we get there with another iteration? Sure! But that's not what the question was asking.

I'm sure some people will say that GPT gave the right solution. So what that it ignored the case of a singular array and assumed all inputs are arrays. I didn't give it an example of a singular array or non-array inputs, but it did just assume. I mean leetcode questions pull out way more edge cases than I'm griping on here.

So maybe you're just cherry-picking. Maybe the author is just cherry-picking. Because their assertion that "AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023" is not unobjectively true. It's not clear that this is true in 2025!

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02843

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/688ea18e-d51c-8013-afb5-fbc85db0da...

[2] https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-program-for-inse...

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

#283

Post by sbinnee »

bbminner wrote: post #194
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…

Hm, I thought that these salaries were offered to actual "giants" like Jeff Dean or someone extremely knowledgeable in the specifics of how the "business side" of AI might look like (CEOs, etc). Can someone clarify what is so special about this specific person? He is not a "top tier athlete" - I looked at his academic profile and it does not seem impressive to me by any measure. He'd make an alright (not even particu…

I think the key was multimodality. Meta made a big move in combining texts, audio, images. I remember imagebind was pretty cool. Allen AI has published some notable models, and Matt seems to have expertise in multimodal models. Molmo looks really cool.

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

#284

Post by godelski »

parineum wrote: post #280
atleastoptimal wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also worth pointing out that in the same survey it was well agreed upon that success would come sooner if there was more funding. The question was a counterfactual prediction of how much less progress would be made if there was 50% less funding. The response was about 50% less progress.

So honestly, it doesn't seem like many of the predictions are that far off with this in context. That things sped up as funding did too? That was part of the prediction! The other big player here was falling cost of compute. There was pretty strong agreement that if compute was 50% more expensive that this would result in a decrease in progress by >50%.

I think uncontextualized, the predictions don't seem that inaccurate. They're reasonably close. Contextualized, they seem pretty accurate.

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

#285

Post by godelski »

p1esk wrote: post #261
godelski wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chea…

If comparing Deepseek to OpenAI, sure. But OP is comparing DeepSeek to Meta: both are followers.

Yes, but there's also more to what I said than just leader-follower.

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

#286

Post by gddgb »

adammarples wrote: post #264
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…

Who the heck is making profit?

[dead]

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

#287

Post by catmanjan »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #243
catmanjan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can anyone still believe the AGI scam

If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.

Even if we spent 1 million years on LLM it will not result in AGI, we are no closer to AGI with LLM technology than we were with toaster technology

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

#288

Post by atleastoptimal »

godelski wrote: post #282
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…

> The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress What's your argument? That because experts aren't good at making predictions that non-experts must be BETTER at making predictions? Let me ask you this: who do you think is going to make a less accurate prediction? Assuming no one is accurate here, everybody is wrong. So the question is who is more or less accurate. Because there i…

>Go look at the referenced paper[0]. It is on page 3, last item in Figure 1, labeled "Simple Python code given spec and examples". That line is just after 2023 and goes to just after 2028. There's a dot representing the median opinion that's left of the vertical line half way between 2023 and 2028. Last I checked, 8-3 = 5, and 2025 The graph you're looking at is of the 2023 survey, not the 2022 one

As for your question, I don't see what it proves. You described the desired conditions for an a sorting algorithm and chatGPT implemented a sorting algorithm. In the case of an array with one element, it bypasses the for loop automatically and just returns the array. It is reasonable for it to assume all inputs are arrays because your question told it that its requirements were to create a program that " turn any list of numbers into a foobar."

Of course I'm not any one of the researchers asked about their predictions in the survey, but I'm sure if you told them "a SOTA AI in 2025 produced working human readable code based on a list of specifications, and is only incorrect by a broad characterization of what counts as an edge case that would trip up a reasonable human coder on the first try", I'm sure the 2022 or 2023 respondents would say that it meets their criteria for their threshold.

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

#289

Post by libraryatnight »

ceejayoz wrote: post #259
bloodyplonker22 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.

I weep for humanity.

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

#290

Post by Terr_ »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #120
mattlondon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When more than 1 company has "AGI", or whatever we're calling it, and people realise it is not just a license to print money. Some people are rightly pointing out that for quite a lot of things right now we probably already have AGI to a certain extent. Your average AI is way better than the average schmuck on the street in basically anything you can think of - maths, programming, writing poetry, world languages, mus…

I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a lot of the time. I think it's easy for really competent people to get an inflated sense of how good the AI is in the same way that a junior engineer is often only as good as the senior leading them along and feeding them small chunks of work. When led with great foresight, careful calibration, and frequent feedback and mentorship, a mediocre junior engineer…

> I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a lot of the time.

To highlight the inverse: If someone truly has an "AGI" system (the acronym the goalposts have been moved-to) then it wouldn't matter who was wrangling it.

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