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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

#421

Post by bamboozled »

moomin wrote: post #207
stocksinsmocks wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just a matter of taste, but I am pleased to see publicity on people with compensation packages that greatly exceed actors and athletes. It’s about time the nerds got some recognition. My hope is that researchers get the level of celebrity that they deserve and inspire young people to put their minds to building great things.

It’s closer to actors and athletes than we’d all hope, in that most people get a pittance or are out of work while a select few make figures that hit newspapers.

Agree and it's as if these "super smart top researchers" aren't feeding off the insanely hard work of open source contributors who basically got paid nothing to do a bunch of the work they're profiting off.

None of these models are operating in a vacuum.

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

#422

Post by p1esk »

saagarjha wrote: post #417
p1esk wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don’t actually, did he specify a year? He made a lot of predictions, many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.

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

#423

Post by simianwords »

saagarjha wrote: post #418
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.

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

It reinforces meritocracy. What’s the alternative?

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

#424

Post by p1esk »

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?

Absolutely. There are tons of young talented players who just need room to shine

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

#425

Post by Filligree »

discreteevent wrote: post #410
groestl wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How sure do you feel about that?

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

#426

Post by saagarjha »

simianwords wrote: post #423
saagarjha wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It reinforces meritocracy. What’s the alternative?

Why not have the best person get all the money?

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

#428

Post by saagarjha »

p1esk wrote: post #422
saagarjha wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t actually, did he specify a year? He made a lot of predictions, many are wrong, but the AGI one is pretty amazing.

2020s was my understanding; he made this prediction around the time that he made the AGI one. I think he has recently pushed it back to 2030s because it seems unlikely to come true.

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

#429

Post by tossandthrow »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #384
tossandthrow wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probabiliatically improbable - just like the world's most important cryptographic schemes rely on low probability of hash collision. But feel free to prove me wrong - I am ammendable.

I guess there’s a lot of loaded language it’s not really worth debating. But I would never claim they’re ALL smarter than EVERYONE else. But I would expect them to be smart and have relevant experience that everyone else doesn’t have, and I expect the companies offering these salaries aren’t doing it for fun but because they believe their IP or ability to generate IP is very hard to come by, and it’s better to monopo…

> If they could hire 10 people equally as good for 1/10 the price then they would do so.

I think this is where the misunderstanding is. In this context it is not 10 times as much in salary - where it is already highly improbable that a single person provides 10 times as much value as 10 other highly motivated candidates.

You have to increase by orders of magnitude.

Remember that these threads exists in the context of the posted article.

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

#430

Post by croes »

siscia wrote: post #324
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the likelihood of that? Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)

Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?

There are some problems in the world that Meta could help fixing with that money.
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