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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

#551

Post by jatora »

z0r wrote: post #347
jatora wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely be sure of market forces not destroying established behemoths. It simply doesn't happen frequently. Inertia is a real thing. Look at Uber, Tesla, etc. I dont think there necessarily won't be a bust for many fledgeling AI companies though, in fact I'm certain there will be. But thinking Tech Giants are going to crash is woefully ignorant of how the market works and indicates a clear wearing of blind…

You claim to believe in scientific theory and not magic, but you are asserting many things without evidence.

If you want to be more specific I'd be happy to supply evidence for any assertions I made

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

#552

Post by jatora »

parineum wrote: post #277
jatora wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely be sure of market forces not destroying established behemoths. It simply doesn't happen frequently. Inertia is a real thing. Look at Uber, Tesla, etc. I dont think there necessarily won't be a bust for many fledgeling AI companies though, in fact I'm certain there will be. But thinking Tech Giants are going to crash is woefully ignorant of how the market works and indicates a clear wearing of blind…

> However - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will continue to improve... Based on what precedent?

The current trend of continual improvement of LLM coding ability to solve previously unseen problems, handle larger codebases, operate for longer periods of time, and improved agentic scaffolding.

The reward-verifier compatability of programming and RL.

Do you have a stronger precedent for that not being the case?

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

#553

Post by akra »

meekaaku wrote: post #46

why the negativity? no one bats an eye when ronaldo/messi or steph curry or other top athletes get insane salaries. These AI researchers will probably have far more impact on society (good or bad I dont know) than the athletes, and the people who pay them (ie zuck et al) certainly thinks its worth paying them this much because they provide value.

I think the reason for the negativity in this forum (and other threads I've seen over the past few months) is because people are engaged with AI and it seems are deep down not happy with its direction even if they are forced to adapt. That negativity spreads I think to people winning in this which is common in human nature. At least that's the impression I'm getting here and other places. The most commented articles on HN these days are AI (e.g. OpenAI model, some blogger writing about Claude Code gets 500+ comments, etc) which shows a very high level of emotional engagement and have the typical offensive and defensive attitude between people that benefit or lose from this. Also general old school software tech articles are drowned out in comparison; AI is taking all the oxygen out of the room.

My anecdotal observation talking to people: Most tech cycles I've seen have hype/excitement but this is the first one I've been in at least that I've seen a large amount of fear/despair. From loss of jobs, automating all the "good stuff", enriching only the privileged, etc etc people are worried. As loss aversion animals fear is usually more effective for engagement especially if it means a loss of what was before - people are engaged but I suspect negative towards the whole AI thing in general even if they won't say it on the record. Fear also creates a singular focus; when you are threatened/anxious its harder for people to engage with other topics and makes you see AI trend as something you would want to see fail. That paints AI researchers as not just negative; but almost changing their own profession/world for the worse which doesn't elicit a positive response from people.

And for the others, even if they don't have this engagement, the fact that this is drowning out other things can be annoying to some tech workers as well. Other tech talks, articles, research, etc is just silent in comparison.

YMMV; this is just my current anecdotal observations in my limited circle but I suspect others are seeing the same.

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

#554

Post by parineum »

jatora wrote: post #552
parineum wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However - it is absolutely clear that AI powered coding will continue to improve... Based on what precedent?

The current trend of continual improvement of LLM coding ability to solve previously unseen problems, handle larger codebases, operate for longer periods of time, and improved agentic scaffolding. The reward-verifier compatability of programming and RL. Do you have a stronger precedent for that not being the case?

Is it your view that the improvements have been accelerating or constant?

In my view, improvements have been becoming both less frequent and less impressive.

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

#555

Post by ehnto »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #139
ehnto wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do bat an eyelid, many leagues even introduce salary caps in order to quell the negative side effects of insane salaries in sports.

Salary caps are more about keeping smaller clubs competitive. Is it really the case here? I think if this guy's company was acquired for $1B and he made $250M from the sale, people wouldn't be surprised at all.

No you're right, capitalism would not do the same thing as a sports club because the sports club has the incentive to be fair.

Though we give ourselves a pass in the name of capitalism, we could also prioritise fairness in our societies.

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

#556

Post by bbor »

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…

Yeah... Just stay on your toes, I guess. Be open to being wrong, for the sake of you and those around you.

FWIW, "Elon Musk lies" is not a great counterpoint to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

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

#557

Post by jatora »

parineum wrote: post #554
jatora wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current trend of continual improvement of LLM coding ability to solve previously unseen problems, handle larger codebases, operate for longer periods of time, and improved agentic scaffolding. The reward-verifier compatability of programming and RL. Do you have a stronger precedent for that not being the case?

Is it your view that the improvements have been accelerating or constant? In my view, improvements have been becoming both less frequent and less impressive.

Accelerating. Below is a list of the SOTA's over time (with some slight wiggle room between similar era models)

gpt4 | 3/2023

gpt4-turbo - 11/2023

opus3 | 3/2024

gpt4o | 5/2024

sonnet3.5 | 6/2024

o1-preview | 9/2024

o1 | 12/2024

o3-minihigh | 1/2025

gemini2pro | 2/2025

o3 | 4/2025

gemini2.5pro | 4/2025

opus4 | 5/2025

??? | 8/2025

This is also not to mention the miniaturization and democratization of intelligence that is the smaller models which has also been impressive.

Id say this shows that improvements are becoming more frequent.

---

Each wave of models was a significant step above what came previously. One needs only to step back a generation to be reminded of the intelligence differential.

Some notable differences have been with o3mh and gemini2.5's ability to spit out 1-3k loc(lines of code) with accurate alterations (most of the time). Though better prompting should be used to not do this in general, the ability is impressive.

Context length with gemini 2.5 pro's intelligence is incredible. To load 20k+ loc of a project and recieve a targeted code change that implements a perfect update is ridiculous.

The amount of dropped imports and improper syntax has dramatically reduced.

I'd say this shows improvements are becoming more impressive.

---

Also note the timespan.

We are only 25 months into the explosion kicked off by GPT-4.

We are only 12 months into the reasoning paradigm.

We have barely scratched the surface of agentic tooling and scaffolding.

There are countless architectural improvements and alternatives in development and research.

Infrastructure buildouts and compute scaling are also chugging along, allowing faster training, faster inference, faster testing, etc. etc.

---

This all paints a picture of an acceleration in time and depth of capability

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

#558

Post by ath3nd »

bbor wrote: post #556
ath3nd wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah... Just stay on your toes, I guess. Be open to being wrong, for the sake of you and those around you. FWIW, "Elon Musk lies" is not a great counterpoint to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

Well, if LLMs were the next coming of Christ, where is the impact of them on open source?

Everyone claims they are awesome and super powerful in their own toy projects or in their private source. Where is the actual impact of LLMs superior power on OSS?

I can tell you:

We are drowning in slop.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/open-source-project-...

I repeat again: a bunch of words strung randomly together is not thought.

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

#560

Post by geon »

theshackleford wrote: post #74
anon191928 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is he snake oil s. since that time, he with his several teams, actually made electric cars a market wide reality, cheap orbit rockets and with starlink internet almost everywhere possible on earth? snake oil would be over without actually changing the history.

> he with his several teams, actually made electric cars a market wide reality Electric cars? That would be Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, Tesla’s actual founders. They created the Roadster and brought the vision. Musk came in with money, staged a hostile takeover, and then rewrote the company’s history to fit his inflated ego, like the sad little man he is. It's honestly cringe. > cheap orbit rockets and with…

Little of what you mention was evident before 2014.
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