I recall a time where a post doc spent in graph theory ML was the worst career choice for students. Make sure you get paid in cash. =3
A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
401–410 of 575 posts
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?
If it were me, yeah, park it in bonds and live off the interest on a tropical beach. Spend my days spearfishing and drinking beers with the locals. Have no concerns except how even my tan is (and tbh I don't see myself caring too much about that). I'd forget the word shareholder even exists.
Sounds good in theory but I'd be bored to death in a month, at most two.
Traveling the world...maybe good for a few more months and that's it.
Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#403This 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…
I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario. If that is to happen, I think the following assumptions must hold: 1) The winner immediately becomes a monopoly 2) All investments are directed from competitors, to the winner 3) Research on AGI/ASI ceases I don't see how any of these would be viable. Right now there's an incremental model arms race, with no companies holding a secret sauce so powerful that they're…
> Right now there's an incremental model arms race
Yes, but just like in an actual arms race, we don't know if this can evolve in a winner takes all scenario very quickly and literally.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of enterprise adoption
But those are just the sort of cases that are more likely to switch to the latest, greatest and cheapest when they come around. The fact that even these haven't become winner takes all is a strong signal that these models have sticking power.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#405Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#406Ok people, is this for real like are these detached IC roles or are these articles talking about executive rolles filled by a.i. researchers?
Source: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+ packages They are IC roles for the most part
Any idea roughly how many $100M offers have been made. I initially thought that there were maybe 1-2 such offers and the remaining were maybe around $10-25M. However, judging by this particular case and another report where a $1.5B offer was made to a someone at Thinking Machines, I think that the actual number of such offers is much higher.
Any idea if the Googles/Apples are offering similar retention grants to prevent key employees from leaving?
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#407I 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.
Most sources confirmed that yearly effective pay would be 100M level, unlike the normal tech breakdown.
OpenAI doesn’t do the usual equity for employees, they famously do profit sharing.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#408Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.
Woah, a whopping 0.5%. That's like working 12 minutes more every week. I waste much more time every day because of how slow and sluggish Windows 11 is.
0.5% across all the world's population would be a significant achievement. The fact that you spend this much time in Windows 11 is actually a crime against humanity.
Re: A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario. If that is to happen, I think the following assumptions must hold: 1) The winner immediately becomes a monopoly 2) All investments are directed from competitors, to the winner 3) Research on AGI/ASI ceases I don't see how any of these would be viable. Right now there's an incremental model arms race, with no companies holding a secret sauce so powerful that they're…
> Right now there's an incremental model arms race Yes, but just like in an actual arms race, we don't know if this can evolve in a winner takes all scenario very quickly and literally.
> just like in an actual arms race
In an actual arms race you use your arms to actually physically wipe out your enemy.
It's not just like an arms race.