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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

#511

Post by andrewrn »

TrackerFF wrote: post #245
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 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…

I agree with this comment.

Maybe it's just me but I haven't been model-hopping one bit. For my daily chatbot usage, I just don't feel inclined to model-hop so much to squeeze out some tiny improvement. All the models are way beyond "good enough" at this point, so I just continue using ChatGPT and switching back and forth from o3 and 4o. I would love to hear if others are different.

Maybe others are doing some hyper-advanced stuff where the edging out makes a difference, but I just don't buy it.

A good example is search engines. Google is a pseudo-monopoly because google search gives obviously better results than bing or duckduckgo. In my experience this just isn't the case for LLM's. Its more nuanced than better or worse. LLM's are more like car models where everyone makes a personal choice on which they like the best.

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

#512

Post by lostmsu »

Voultapher wrote: post #501
lostmsu wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is plain wrong AFAIK. You can't just print Y stock on a whim because that would dilute shareholders.

https://money.stackexchange.com/a/155106 the argument is that it doesn't dilute the stock because the thing they bought makes the company that much more worth. If they trade newly created shares for a metric ton of gold, that logic seems quite plausible, but it get's more sketchy when things like IP or companies are bought. Or as in this case even more sketchy, where I'd argue this one person will not raise the value…

This generally does not apply to publicly traded companies.

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

#513

Post by cesarb »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #505
cesarb wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that framing really gives enough credit to how novel the iPhone was, and how it shook up the market when it was introduced. Yes, PDAs had already been a thing for a long time (Psion Organizer), and Apple themselves had experimented with this category too with the Newton, before the Palm Pilot then became so dominant. What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn…

> What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box.

I used a Palm PDA back in the pre-iPhone days. Its functionality was not "limited to what you got out of the box", you could install applications on it. I have fond memories of exchanging Palm applications with my friends through its infrared port. I used it as a PDA, MP3 player, camera, to play games, and even as a handheld web browser (it didn't come with a web browser, it was one of the applications I installed), using a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone for the network access. The only thing it couldn't do, was making phone calls; for that, I used that cell phone on my other pocket. That's the defining characteristic of a smartphone: being a phone which can do all the things a PDA could already do.

> and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).

That Palm PDA also lacked a keyboard. It was designed to be used without a keyboard, and worked pretty well, with either the stylus or the on-screen keyboard (which was usable even without the stylus). So it was not a given that the lack of a keyboard would be a deficit.

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

#514

Post by xandrius »

lionkor wrote: post #419
xorcist wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If $250M is still not enough, you are definitely broken.

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

#515

Post by xandrius »

recipe19 wrote: post #351
ghushn3 wrote: post #331

I 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.

I'd expect a few millions of annual pay, anyone could retire on that. Whether someone wants to, it's different but having anything beyond $1M available is definitely sufficient, especially if you're sub-40.

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

#516

Post by jfrbfbreudh »

ath3nd wrote: post #450
bbor wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~…

Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence". We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products a…

dude, computers are just rocks that we coerced into adding 1’s and 0’s. when are people finally going to wake up?

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

#517

Post by aianus »

Voultapher wrote: post #469
tonyhart7 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but its not made up money tho, meta(fb) must buy out stocks at certain point while its true that many of its would vested for period of time. it still cost them in the future what more embarrassing is that they do this to poach AI talent because they massively behind on AI races, like they literally still to the extend of king of social media (fb,instragram,whatsapp etc) they should do better given how much data…

I think you are under a misconception as to how this work. Let's say Meta wants to give this person 100M in stock, they don't have to buy 100M worth of stock when the option vests. What they do is, go into their accounting software and look at how many shares they have, let's call this amount X. And they will increase the total number of shares from X to X+Y where Y is worth 100M at current valuation. They never need…

Meta buys back stock all the time, in practice they do the opposite of diluting shareholders.

You're right that they don't need to do this.

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

#518

Post by ben_w »

ath3nd wrote: post #450
bbor wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~…

Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence". We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products a…

Other than the rockets and Starlink, I do not trust anything from Musk. Mainly because while everyone whose opinion I trust about rockets says "LGTM", everyone whose opinion I trust on all the other things he does says as per https://xkcd.com/2030/

I don't trust Zuckerberg. Bad vibes about everything Facebook ever since I went to one of their developer conferences in London a bit over a decade ago, only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't even pay for ads on their system, given the ads I see think I want dick pills and boob surgery, and are trying to get me to give up a citizenship I never had in the first place while relocating to a place I've actually left. Sometimes they're in languages I don't speak.

And while I can't say that I have any negative vibes from Altman, I've learned to trust all the people who do say he's a wrong 'un, as they were right about a few other big names before him.

And I wouldn't invest in any of the companies making LLMs, because I think the whole "no moat" argument is being shown to be plausible by way of how close behind all the open models are.

But LLMs are, despite all that, obviously useful even if you see them as only autocomplete. They're obviously useful even if you think they're just a blurry JPEG of the internet. They're obviously useful even if they're never going to meaningfully improve.

LLMs are not like NFTs. Might be like Mars, though.

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

#519

Post by ben_w »

sebtron wrote: post #378
mensetmanusman wrote: post #299

Earlier 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% of USD 100 trillion per year, with a usual accounting I've seen being that you can count that boost for the next 20 years, is worth 0.5% * $100T/year * 20 years = USD 10 trillion.

Now, we don't have a single investor making this investment nor getting the reward for the investment, but that's the kind of overall shape of the reasoning behind why people are willing to invest so much in AI.

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

#520

Post by turnsout »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #503
turnsout wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how (checks notes) everything has always worked. In a large project such as introducing the first GUI for general use, you can't do everything yourself. If you're within a company, you hire people. You take inspiration from the outside. It's a team effort, and not the result of a lone genius. That does not diminish what Jobs did. The Mac and the Lisa were underway before the Xerox PARC visit. The idea of mixe…

The Lisa product - a business-focussed follow on to the Apple II, was initiated before Jobs visited Xerox, but nonetheless copied Xerox's Alto GUI. https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-lisa-apples-most-influe... Lisa attracted a lot of interest, but was outrageously expensive (~$50K in 2025 dollars) as well as being slow. The Mac in its final form is best regarded as a cheaper performant Lisa.

Three things to add:

1. Neither the Lisa nor Mac "copied" the Alto. They took inspiration, but again, the Lisa project began before the team ever visited Xerox. These ideas were in the air in SV, but no one had figured out how to commercialize it. Sort of like conversational UI circa 2015.

2. The Mac was more than a warmed-over Lisa. If you use both, you'll see how much more polished and complete the Mac is.

3. The Mac was a product where the price point really mattered, and was part of the product identity. You can't have "the computer for the rest of us" at the Lisa's price point. Getting that retail price down required a ton of ingenious software and hardware engineering, which was driven forward relentlessly by Jobs.

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