Just like few years ago “blockchain contract auditors”, and before that “big data bla bla”, and before that “cybersecurity xyz”, you always have people who try to grift as much as possible from the ${current bubble}.
A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
311–320 of 575 posts
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coming from Meta, I have to wonder if the reason for this isn't more down to Zuck's ego and history. He seems to have somewhat lost interest in FaceBook, and was previously all-in on the Metaverse as the next big thing, which has failed to take off as a concept, and now wants to go all-in on "super-intelligence" (seems to lack ambition - why not "super-duper extra special intelligence"?) with his new vision being sma…
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world. He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AG…
> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones.
Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. The talent pool is extremely small and the companies want the absolute best. It is the same thing in sports as well. There will only ever be one Michael Jordan one Lionel Messi one Tiger Woods one Magnus Carlsen. And they are paid a lot because they are worth it. >> Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't…
Hot fucking take - but if these 100 (or whatever small number is being thrown around these days) elite researchers disappeared overnight, the world would go on and little of it would be noticed. New people in the field would catch up, and things would be up to speed quick enough. It is not a question of exquisitely rare intellect, but rather the opportunity and funding/resources to prosper.
Hmmmm, I think only assuming those 100 have not been accurately identified. In pretty much all fields I am familiar with, the ability distribution seems to approximate a power law near the top: the gap between the best and the 20th best can be absolutely gigantic.
(And while there are certainly those who could have been the best who did not have the opportunity to succeed, or just didn't actually want to pursue it, I think usually this is way at the edges, i.e. removing the top would not make room for these people, because they're probably not even on anyone's radar at all, like the 'Einstein toiling in a field')
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#314So 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 b…
How can anyone still believe the AGI scam
I can't believe this is so unpopular here. Maybe it's the tone, but come on, how do people rationally extrapolate from LLMs or even large multimodal generative models to "general intelligence"? Sure, they might do a better job than the average person on a range of tasks, but they're always prone to funny failures pretty much by design (train vs test distribution mismatch). They might combine data in interesting ways you hadn't thought of; that doesn't mean you can actually rely on them in the way you do on a truly intelligent human.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#315I am sure people here will disagree with me, but I do not think that the 250M$ packages makes sense. In my opinion nobody is is worth 1000s times more the other people in the same field. A way to deal with this is through the tax system that would make it economically inefficient to have insane pay packages. Obviously that will not happen (especially in the US).
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#316Earlier 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…
> "Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents."
Claim doesn't check out; here's a YouTube video from Apple uploaded in 2021, explaining how to enable and use the iPhone feature to speak a high level human description of what the camera is pointed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnoeaUpHKxY
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble.
I have two questions about this, really:
- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?
- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?
That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?
The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.
The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.
"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.
For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.
But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.
And that could burst your bubble.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#318I am sure people here will disagree with me, but I do not think that the 250M$ packages makes sense. In my opinion nobody is is worth 1000s times more the other people in the same field. A way to deal with this is through the tax system that would make it economically inefficient to have insane pay packages. Obviously that will not happen (especially in the US).
All you did was offer your arbitrary opinion without any supporting argument or anecdotal evidence and suggested we should fix it with more taxes.
If you're going to offer an opinion contrary to the majority, you should at least have a convincing argument why.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#319Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world. He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AG…
> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D
He didn’t have to be the first to be the one most associated with popularizing the technology.