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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

#451

Post by UmGuys »

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…

I don't think so. It's just a bubble. There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots. If someone were to achieve AGI, maybe they win, but it's unlikely to exist. Or if it does, we can't define it.

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

#452

Post by wisemang »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #330
exasperaited wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble. I have two questions about this, really: - is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO? - are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires ? That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a succ…

Sure, though the barrier is quite high to fake it.

Depends on who exactly you’re trying to convince.

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

#453

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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?

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

Yes, I do.

I am aware of some quite deep scientific results that would have a deep impact (and thus likely bring a lot of business value) if these were applied in practice.

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

#454

Post by aleph_minus_one »

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?

> Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

Cynical take: increasing Meta's stock value does improve the lifes of many - the many stock holders.

Thus: when you talk about improving lifes, you better specify which group you are targeting, and why you selected this particular group.

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

#455

Post by TrackerFF »

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 sports is even more susceptible to the influence of capital.

Athletes need the following:

- talent/potential - ability (talent that has been realized) - work ethic - luck (could be something as simple as avoiding injuries, supportive family / friends / guardians, etc.)

That will usually get you on the radar. You'll be identified by your coach, talent agents, etc.

Once you cross a certain threshold, usually by the time you've been picked out by talent agents / joined a youth academy, and signed for a sports club with the financial means, you get access to a whole infrastructure that has one goal, and one goal only: To unlock your full potential, and make you the best athlete you can be.

And it is not that unsimilar to how AI researchers are brought up. If you look at pretty much any of the top AI talent, they have the following pedigree:

Very gifted HS students that went to feeder schools / academies, and / or participated in some STEM Olympiad -> Prestigious universities or some top ranking schools in their field -> Well-funded and prestigious research group -> top internships and post-grad employment (or they dropped out to join/found a startup)

You could be the smartest researcher in the world, but if you're stuck at some dinky school with zero budget, and can't (or don't get the change to) relocate, you're going to be stuck at the B/C/D-league.

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

#457

Post by nopinsight »

UmGuys wrote: post #451
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…

I don't think so. It's just a bubble. There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots. If someone were to achieve AGI, maybe they win, but it's unlikely to exist. Or if it does, we can't define it.

What would you say if the IMO Gold Medal models from DeepMind and OpenAI turn out to be generalizable to other domains including those with hard-to-verify reward signals?

Hint: Researchers from both companies said publicly they employ generalized reasoning techniques in these IMO models.

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

#458

Post by nopinsight »

Mistletoe wrote: post #412
nopinsight wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree. I just personally wouldn’t want to wander around exploring it continuously for months without more interesting work/goals. Even though cultures and geography may be wonderfully varied, their ranges are way smaller than what could be.

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

#459

Post by satrxrer »

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.

I think Dario Amodei just said this much on a podcast and that is why he isn't worried.

That they are building a team with a selection bias for this too.

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

#460

Post by kevinmchugh »

wyre wrote: post #434
HWR_14 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.

As LLM's get smarter and more capable on smaller and smaller computers Anthropic, Google, Grok, OpenAI, and Meta (is there an acronym, like FAANG, for the giant AI companies? MOGGA? GOMAG?) will have to get creative with profit-drivers, when consumers will have a very capable LLM built-in to their computing device(s), and it can easily be worth the cost to a business to invest in the computing power to provide on-dev…

MAGOG, certainly.
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