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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

#491

Post by hattmall »

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…

There's no doubt the primary use for "AI" will be generating rage inducing engagement bait to squeeze a few more seconds of advertising into our days.

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

#492

Post by scoreandmore »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #381
siscia wrote: post #324

Earlier 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.

I met a youngster on Boca del Toro island in Panama a decade or so ago. I was about to be fired from my FAANG job so I used up years and years of vacation for one big trip before I was let go. We hung out for a few days while I was there (I don’t recommend the place at all btw). He cashed out from early twitter and was setting up surf schools all of the world. All he did was travel, surf, drink, and fuck. I’m still angry that laughed at all the dumb startups in the late 2000s instead of joining them. But this guy did what you’re suggesting, and I think there are many more unknown techbros who did it too.

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

#494

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312
turnsout wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world. He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AG…

> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D

Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone.

Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use.

The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7qPAY9JqE4

The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.

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

#495

Post by Eisenstein »

hattmall wrote: post #487
Eisenstein wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve." "Nuclear power plants are a very sophisticated steam generator with a few tricks down their sleeve." These things are both just as true and just as informative.

Nuclear is actually a great example. It's a major scientific accomplishment but pretty much the least cost effective method of energy generation. Nuclear allowed us to generate huge amounts of energy to waste on whatever we like when the real focus should be on massively decreasing energy demands. But of course that doesn't make anyone money.

Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator. You can spend all your effort trying to do something that isn't going to happen without forcing people to do it, and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.

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

#496

Post by cesarb »

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.

> There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots.

"Fancy chatbots" is a classic AI use case. ELIZA is a well-known example of early AI software.

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

#497

Post by UmGuys »

cesarb wrote: post #496
UmGuys wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots. "Fancy chatbots" is a classic AI use case. ELIZA is a well-known example of early AI software.

I'm not familiar with ELIZA. Technical terms mean things. AI has no technical meaning. It's difficult to distinguish what people mean when they say AI, but as technical people I assume we know AGI doesn't exist yet and we don't know if it ever will.

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

#498

Post by cweld510 »

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?

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

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

#499

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

godelski wrote: post #251
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think he gave up on the metaverse. Isn't AR glasses a stepping stone towards that? Or rather LLM voice assistant a stepping stone towards AR glasses? And the metaverse being a stepping stone towards a holodeck? I mean I'm with you, I think these things are pretty far away and are going to cost a lot of money to make and require a lot of failure in the mean time. But then again, it looks like they spent ~$18bn…

The Metaverse was more about virtual reality than AR .. a virtual place where remote teams would work and business meetings be held etc, and as such seems to be a complete flop. This is just not how remote teams want to work. Superior VR googles are of course used for gaming too.

AR seems to be mostly a solution, or technology, looking for a problem. It's a bit like envisioning a future full of flying cars, or humanoid robots walking among us, or even wired picture phones (World Fair 1964). Just because you can, doesn't mean you will have "product market fit" and that people will find a use or want to use what you have built.

Maybe AR will find niche professional or entertainment uses (cf Segway) - could imagine using them in a museum or on a guided tourist tour, perhaps.

It's funny that Zuck as creator of FaceBook, seems to misjudge human nature so badly in the case of Metaverse or mass-adoption smart glasses AR. It seems he maybe just got lucky that his college dating app grew into something much larger and more successful, although he does seem quite competent as a CEO, just not as the serial entrepreneur he seems to fancy himself as.

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

#500

Post by cesarb »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #494
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Steve Jobs neither gave/invented GUIs nor smartphones. :-D

Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone. Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use. The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, a…

The smartphone is nothing more than a merge of a traditional cell phone (what we now call "feature phone") and a PDA. Such a merge would happen sooner or later, either with PDAs acquiring the ability to also act as cell phones, or with cell phones gaining the ability to also act as PDAs. Apple might have accelerated that change, but it was inevitable.
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