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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

#411

Post by Hamuko »

tantalor wrote: post #249
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…

> could be worth... Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?

In this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.

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

#412

Post by Mistletoe »

nopinsight wrote: post #402
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The world is sufficiently large and complex that a few months wouldn’t even scrape the tip of the iceberg.

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

#413

Post by saagarjha »

matco11 wrote: post #399

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 can have an exciting, high impact career without being paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

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

#414

Post by throwbott »

habosa wrote: post #395

I don’t like this because it inspires my relatives to keep sending me links to these stories and asking why I’m not going to work at Meta and getting my billions. Mark, please do this stuff quietly so I can continue in my quiet mediocrity.

[dead]

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

#415

Post by saagarjha »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #163
lores wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like in football, buying all the best players pretty much guarantees failure as egos and personal styles clash and take precedence over team achievement. The only reasons one would do that are fear, vanity, and stupidity, and those have to be more important than getting value for the extraordinary amounts of money invested.

First rate A-players are beyond petty ego clashes, practically by definition… otherwise they wouldn’t be considered so highly (and thus fall into the bozo category).

If you're the only one considering them, sure.

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

#416

Post by saagarjha »

jimmy2times wrote: post #303
p1esk wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same about any set of 100 people.

Can you say the same about the top 100 basketball players?

I think it would be about the same, to be honest. There is always someone who is 90% as good as Stephen Curry and we'll rescale our expectations to match.

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

#417

Post by saagarjha »

p1esk wrote: post #272
atleastoptimal wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be a…

Exactly. There’s one guy - Ray Kurzweil - who predicted in late 90s that AGI will happen in 2029 (yes, the exact year, based on his extrapolations of Moore’s law). Everybody laughed at him, but it’s increasingly likely he’ll be right on the money with that prediction.

Remember when he said nanobots would cure all our diseases by a few years ago?

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

#418

Post by saagarjha »

simianwords wrote: post #33
monero-xmr wrote: post #19

There are sports stars who are paid similarly - rare talent that is in demand. Luckily there aren’t “software unions” like there are players’ unions to cap the max payment. Any left wing / socialist person on HN should be ecstatic - literally applauding with grins on their faces - that workers are extracting such sums out of the capitalist class. The hate for these salaries is mind boggling to me, and shows a lot of…

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.

How exactly does one guy making a billion dollars help the lower class?

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

#419

Post by lionkor »

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.

Im sure in the US you can never have enough money

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

#420

Post by lionkor »

matt_cogito wrote: post #257

Am I reading this correctly: an AI researcher might get paid roughly the same amount of money as the largest transfer of a soccer player in history (Neymar at €220M)? There is hope for humanity. Jokes aside, how and why?

How: Meta has the money because they presumably have infinite margins.

Why: Its a bubble.

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