I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.
A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
331–340 of 575 posts
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#332I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.
This is a great point, but some passions fundamentally require other people and capital.
These AI researchers fundamentally need access to tons of compute, data and engineers in order to pursue their passion.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#333I'm sure a very small number of these AI researchers will be worth the pay (and then some), but I imagine the marjority of them will only manage to make marginal gains in the projects they work on. I guess it's a little like venture capital, where the majority of the startups that you fund end up flopping, but a small number of them provide returns that make up for all of the losses.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#334I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.
Eh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#335Good 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?
This seems like it lands in the "most uncharitable" side of the "guess why someone is doing something I don't understand" spectrum. My razors tell me this is usually not the most plausible answer.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#336Imagine if any one of these tech companies decided the future was in solving problems for humanity rather than how to serve adverts in a future where content was autogenerated. The money and resources they have available is astronomical. Instead they spend it on future proofing their profits. What a sad world we have built.
"In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.
We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."
- https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm
"Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990. In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.
A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.
You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up."
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#337I don't think I've ever understood the motivation behind working for so much money. If I got paid $250M a year, I'd work a year and then live comfortably for the rest of my life pursuing my passions. Even if the thing I was doing for work was my passion, I'm sure I'd prefer to do it without ownership of that work going to someone else.
You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#338My 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)
Even if what you say is true, people don't add in this way. They still need to be managed, motivated, and somehow made to work together toward something of value.
Microsoft Research had hundreds of big brains for decades that all worked independently and added little of value to the business.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#339Earlier 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.
There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.