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

Post by wiseowise » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 3:27 AM UTC

godelski wrote: post #239

storus wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLaMA 4 is barely better than LLaMA 3.3 so a year of development didn't bring any worthy gains for Meta, and execs are likely panicking in order not to slip further given what even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to them.

> 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…

Post by chychiu » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 3:32 AM UTC

jjmarr wrote: post #229

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…

The actual OpenRouter data says otherwise.[1] Right now, Google leads with only 28.4% marketshare. Anthropic (24.7%), Deepseek (15.4%), and Qwen (10.8%) are the runners-up. If this were winner-take-all market with low switching costs, we'd be seeing instant majority market domination whenever a new SOTA model comes out every few weeks. But this isn't happening in practice, even though it's much easier to switch model…

Post by wiseowise » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 3:45 AM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #156

There has to be more at play here. Was this some kind of acquihire? No 24 year old in the history of 24 year olds has been worth $250 million on the basis of their intellectual merit. Even granting that they were some kind of one-off super genius, no single human is that smart or productive, to be worth the bankroll of a literal army of PhDs. He has to be bringing more to the table.

Post by fooker » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 3:50 AM UTC

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…

Post by wiseowise » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 3:54 AM UTC

saubeidl wrote: post #122

mathgeek wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which analogy(s) are you going for? The world is about to end so money is essentially worthless? The players with all the money are going to move on to something else soon? The game ceased to be fun for anyone so they all want to find other things to do? I assume you are going for “there are no more useful resources to acquire so those with all the resources overpay just to feel like they own those last few they don’…

Capitalism is about to break. The revolution is coming.