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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

#291

Post by stefan_ »

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…

That is exactly how all of this has played out so far (beep, not at fucking all!)

You are not one random hyperparameter away from the SciFi singularity. You are making iterative improvements and throwing more compute at the problem, as are all your competitors, all of which are to some degree utterly exchangeable.

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

#292

Post by Terr_ »

impossiblefork wrote: post #140
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…

Nah. The models are great, but the models can also write a story where characters who in the prompt are clearly specified as never having met are immediately addressing each other by name. These models don't understand anything similar to reality and they can be confused by all sorts of things. This can obviously be managed and people have achieved great things with them, including this IMO stuff, but the models are…

> a story

Yeah, that framing for LLMs is one of my pet-causes: It's document generation, some documents resemble stories with characters, and everything else (e.g. "chatting" with an LLM) is an illusion, albeit an impressive and sometimes-useful one.

Being able to generate a document where humans perceive plausible statements from Santa Claus does not mean Santa Claus now lives inside the electronic box, that flying sleighs are real, etc. The principle still holds even if the character is described as "an intelligent AI assistant named [Product Name]".

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

#293

Post by ihsw »

libraryatnight wrote: post #289
ceejayoz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I weep for humanity.

That $250M is (societally) better off going to him than being spent on whatever the hell Meta was going to otherwise spend it on.

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

#294

Post by rfw300 »

fidotron wrote: post #78

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.

It has nothing to do with Meta's social media business. Zuckerberg, like many other top tech executives, has concluded AGI/ASI is in striking distance. If he could somehow win the race, he becomes god (or so he thinks, anyway). And from the perspective of a man whose idol is Julius Caesar, what wouldn't you spend for that chance?

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

#295

Post by exasperaited »

catmanjan wrote: post #287
atleastoptimal wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

“Would you like a toasted teacake?”

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

#296

Post by jodrellblank »

firesteelrain wrote: post #150
mhb wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of confidence that this is a bubble rather than an existential race. Maybe you're making bank betting that view?

Not sure what you mean but if I was to invest I would have invested years ago in NVIDIA.

Given that $5k in nVidia in 2015 when their stock was trading at $0.75/share would be $1.1M today at $173.72/share, that's very principled of you to have the winning pick ready, and not do it.

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

#297

Post by exasperaited »

beau_g wrote: post #146
normie3000 wrote: post #106

How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.

These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.

Hahaha well you got me there. They are earning it.

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

#298

Post by xorcist »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #147
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…

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.

Not really the same, is it? Actors are hired to act. Athletes get paid to improve the sport. It's not like nerds are poached to do academic research or nerd out at their hearts desire. This is a business transaction that Zuck intends to make money from.

Locking up more of the world's information behind their login wall, or increase their ad sales slightly is not enough to make that kind of money. We can only speculate, of course, but at the same time I think the general idea is pretty clear: AI will soon have a lot of power, and control over that power is thought to be valuable.

The bit about "building great things" certainly rings true. Just not in the same way artists or scientists do.

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

#299

Post by mensetmanusman »

exasperaited wrote: post #250
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…

This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble. But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him. This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simp…

Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.

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

#300

Post by nrmitchi »

My mental model is looking at all of these situations as pre-emptive aquihires.

Meta can make 40 of these hires (over a number of years) and still be in a better place than feeling like they have to make a single $10B acquisition (if they could even make it at that point)

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