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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

#351

Post by recipe19 »

ghushn3 wrote: post #331

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.

These aren't annual pay packages. It's some "can't retire on that" base salary plus a promise of gradually vesting equity on a multi-year schedule. For public companies, you'll get that amount if you hang around for x years and there is no sudden decline in market price. For non-public companies (OpenAI), the equity is more pie-in-the-sky.

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

#352

Post by jdefr89 »

brandall10 wrote: post #169
AIPedant wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distribution is merely tricky to pin down when looking at overall AI spend, i.e. these "$T+ scale impacts." But the distribution for individual researcher salaries really is pure guesswork. How does the datapoint of "Attention Is All You Need?" fit in to this distribution? The authors had very comfortable Google salaries but certainly not 9-figure contracts. And OpenAI and Anthropic (along with NVIDIA's elevated…

When Attention is All You Need was published, the market as it stands didn't exist. It's like comparing the pre-Jordan NBA to post. Same game, different league. I'd argue the top individual researchers figure into the overall AI spend. They are the people leading teams/labs and are a marketable asset in a number of ways. Extrapolate this further outward - why does Jony Ive deserve to be part of a $6B aquihire? Why do…

Seriously. The transformer coupled with tons of compute is why we got here. When that paper came out and people (AI researchers) saw the results many were confused or unconvinced. No one has any clue such an architecture would yield the results it has. AI systems has always been far more art than science and we still don’t even really know why it works. I feel like that idea being stumbled upon was sort of more luck than anything…

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

#353

Post by jdefr89 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312
turnsout wrote: post #175

Earlier 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

Lmao right!? Dude stole all that from Xerox and MS came out with palm pilots early 2000s then you had black berry. Amazing how many people think CEOs actually did the work they get credit for when they almost virtually all were in the right spot with the right people. Notice none of them can reproduce or start another ultra successful startup… Zuckerberg is a perfect example of one hit wonder and he wasn’t even the first to create social sites.. You had MySpace and a ton of others..

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

#354

Post by jdefr89 »

turnsout wrote: post #320
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That just shows you how warped the minds of the general public are. They fail to realize the only thing Jobs did was know the right people then take all the credit…

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

#355

Post by [deleted] »

Buttons840 wrote: post #337
ghushn3 wrote: post #331

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.

You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.

[deleted]

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

#357

Post by exasperaited »

throwdbaaway wrote: post #341
exasperaited wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 succ…

> The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. You started to sound like Dario, who likes to accuse others as intellectually dishonest and unserious. Anyway, perhaps the strict wage structure of Anthropic will be its downfall in this crazy bubble?

I am accusing no one individually or particularly. I am observing that the problem is that within a bubble, people collectively become increasingly unserious and less intellectually honest as their appetite for risk increases with their desire to get a slice of the action. Indeed, it gets worse as people begin to think it might not last forever.

The same thing happened in the dotcom era, the same thing happened in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Every single bubble displays these characteristics.

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

#358

Post by tracerbulletx »

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…

Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.

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

#360

Post by polski-g »

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 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.

Well only if the price is the same. Otherwise people will value price over quality, or quality over price. Like they do for literally every other product they select...

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