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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

#391

Post by elbear »

xorcist wrote: post #308
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #126

Wonder what their contracts look like. Are these people gonna be grinding their ass off at the Meta offices working crazy hours? Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum success? And if so, what does that form of success look like? So far the vision that Zucc has outlined has been rather underwhelming, but maybe the vision which he s…

What I most would like to understand is how you intend to motivate someone you just gave a quarter of a billion dollars to? Especially a young person. They never have to work again, and neither do their grandchildren. You can just doodle away with whatever research interests you the most, there's no need to deliver a god mode AI to the great leader even if you had the ability to.

Seems like their only motivation is their desire to succeed, glory, etc.

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

#392

Post by etempleton »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #130
MichaelZuo wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They just want the best, and they’re afraid of having second rates, B-players, etc., causing a bozo explosion. That seems like all the motivation that’s needed. Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?

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…

Zuckerberg is one of the reasons I think AI is a bubble and overhyped. He lacks vision. Remember when they renamed the company Meta and the metaverse was the whole future of the company?

This is the same thing. It is the new shiny tech demo that is really cool. And technically works really, really well and has some real uses, but that doesn’t make a multi billion dollar business.

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

#393

Post by etempleton »

meekaaku wrote: post #46

why the negativity? no one bats an eye when ronaldo/messi or steph curry or other top athletes get insane salaries. These AI researchers will probably have far more impact on society (good or bad I dont know) than the athletes, and the people who pay them (ie zuck et al) certainly thinks its worth paying them this much because they provide value.

Sports teams pay Ronaldo, Messi, and Curry because they win games and that puts fans in seats and attracts sponsors that pay those teams money and turn a profit.

When someone had a successful business model that offsets the incredible costs let me know, but it is all hypothetical.

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

#394

Post by wulfstan »

jimmy2times wrote: post #314
catmanjan wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it’s selection bias - a y-combinator forum is going to have a larger percentage of people who are techno-utopianists than general society, and there will be many seeking financial success by connecting with a trend at the right moment. It seems obvious to me that LLMs are interesting but not revolutionary, and equally obvious that they aren’t heading for any kind of “general intelligence”. They’re good at pretending, and only good at that to the extent that they can mine what has already been expressed.

I suppose some are genuine materialists who think that ultimately that is all we are as humans, just a reconstitution of what has come before. I think we’re much more complicated than that.

LLMs are like the myth of Narcissus and hypnotically reflect our own humanity back at us.

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

#396

Post by bbminner »

sbinnee wrote: post #283
bbminner wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I thought that these salaries were offered to actual "giants" like Jeff Dean or someone extremely knowledgeable in the specifics of how the "business side" of AI might look like (CEOs, etc). Can someone clarify what is so special about this specific person? He is not a "top tier athlete" - I looked at his academic profile and it does not seem impressive to me by any measure. He'd make an alright (not even particu…

I think the key was multimodality. Meta made a big move in combining texts, audio, images. I remember imagebind was pretty cool. Allen AI has published some notable models, and Matt seems to have expertise in multimodal models. Molmo looks really cool.

Looking at Molmo description:

"Our key innovation is a new collection of datasets called PixMo that includes a novel highly-detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions, and a diverse mixture of fine-tuning datasets that enable new capabilities. Notably, PixMo includes innovative 2D pointing data that enables Molmo to answer questions not just using natural language but also using non verbal cues. We believe this opens up important future directions for VLMs enabling agents to interact in virtual and physical worlds. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and most critically the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which we have released."

This is a solid engineering project with a research component - they collected some data that ended up being quite useful when combined with pre-existing tech. But this is not rocket science and not a unique insight. And I don't want to devalue the importance of solid engineering work, but you normally don't get paid as much for non-unique engineering expertise. This by no means sounds unique to me. This seem like a good senior-staff research eng project in a big tech company these days. You don't get paid 250M for that kind of work. I know very talented people who do this kind of work in big tech, and from what I can tell, many of them appear to have much more fundamental insight and experience, and led larger teams of engineers, and their comp does not surpass 1-2M tops (taking a very generous upper bound).

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

#397

Post by user____name »

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…

Rational inside a deeply olligopolistic and speculative market.

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

#398

Post by simianwords »

jdefr89 wrote: post #346
simianwords wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it was never about rising salaries, it was always about upper middle class urbanites showing fake concern towards the lower class by disparaging people who earn more than them. one would think that a talented academic/researcher getting a 1B salary would impress the socialist people but it doesn't because it was never about that. it was about bringing rich people down and not much else.

I know. For God sakes who will think of the poor billionaires for once! /saracasm

You are doing it again.

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

#399

Post by matco11 »

I love basketball, soccer, and tennis… but you guys have no idea how powerful I have found to share stories like this with my young kids.

Yes, I want them to excel in sports, but these articles provide a crucial counterweight to the all-too-common narrative that becoming a pro athlete is the ultimate dream. Instead, these stories show that being exceptional in STEM isn’t just something you do because you are curious, you find it interesting, you enjoy it (all great motivators), or to please parents and teachers (generally, probably, lesser quality motivators): these stories show that being exceptional in STEM can open doors to exciting, high-impact careers.

It’s been amazing to watch my kids begin to reframe STEM not as the “sensible” thing to do, but as something genuinely cool, aspirational, and full of opportunity.

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

#400

Post by nobodywillobsrv »

What are the actual data on this now? A lot of people I know could be doing AI and I don't think there is that much special in the experience but yes a few years of correct experience matters I suppose. But it does seem bizarre ... Is buying a chance at improving by months of time currently worth billions? Maybe.

It just seems very short cited right now.

Or should I and my friends all be targeting 7-8 figure jobs?

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