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A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
- abtinf 1y agoHN shows this as google.com, but the link is directly to nytimes.com. Bug?
- _Algernon_ 1y agoIt's a redirect.
- stevage 1y agoThe link is a google.com redirect. You probably have an extension installed that auto-resolves such redirects.
- tomhow 1y agoWe updated the link to its redirect URL.
- gedy 1y agoI suppose I’d rather hire 250 bright kids with $1 million package each instead, but I suppose it gets pr.
- atomicnumber3 1y agoJust glancing through the article, it seems like this person is a doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid") and their doctorate is literally in the exact thing that everyone is throwing gobs and gobs of cash at. And I guess Meta (et al) sense that literal empires are at stake here, so this is probably just how much money that's worth to them.
- 48terry 1y ago> doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid") Media has this strange need for fully-grown responsible adults to be thought of as children. Not only for the amazing stories of "this (mid-30s career professional) kid did something", but also helpful to try and shirk responsibility. Thinking about attempts to frame SBF as a wee smol bean kid in over his head while actively committing fraud.
- saulpw 1y agoPh.D. dropout.
- bsder 1y agoTaking immediately available cash instead of finishing a PhD is almost always a good economic decision (we'll leave aside the fact that a PhD is almost always a disastrously bad economic decision). You can always go back and finish your PhD later.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoFor almost every Doctorate except for a few who really want to become postdocs or somehow win the tenure lottery, there is a generally an economic disincentive to completing it.
- p1esk 1y agoYou can easily hire 250 people with doctorates in LLMs if you’re willing to pay $1M salaries. But they are not going to be like this guy.
- ethan_smith 1y agoThe 250:1 substitution doesn't work because breakthrough AI research follows power law distributions where top researchers produce orders of magnitude more value through novel insights that can't be replicated by simply adding more average contributors.
- wiseowise 1y agoWould you get 250 William Ginter Riva’s or 1 Tony Stark? https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/William_Ginter_Riva https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/William_Gint...
- jokoon 1y agoMeanwhile I'm not sure that training myself to do ai would increase my odds of getting a job
- betaby 1y agoProbably not. Definitely not if live outside of the USA.
- checker659 1y agoWithout access to hardware, you don't do much.
- NHQ 1y agoThats only 25M in 2025 dollars.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoStill not enough to afford the house I grew up in in San Jose.
- vivzkestrel 1y agoand what exactly is this "whiz" kid capable of doing that you and I cant
- warofwords 1y agoI think Meta has a problem of none of their users wanting any more of their services and they have a very distinct brand taint Paying 250m to a genius to more deeply entrap user time and attention is going to look diabolical unless there are measurable user life improvement outcome measurements... if metas more slop addiction that 250m is a diabolical contract
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- brcmthrowaway 1y agoWhat am I doing with my life...
- ed_elliott_asc 1y agoImagine if any one of these tech companies decided the future was in solving problems for humanity rather than how to serve adverts in a future where content was autogenerated. The money and resources they have available is astronomical. Instead they spend it on future proofing their profits. What a sad world we have built.
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- AndyKelley 1y agoone of my favorite songs embodies this concept: https://soundcloud.com/adventurecapitalists/moving-mt-fuji https://soundcloud.com/adventurecapitalists/moving-mt-fuji lyrics: https://genius.com/Adventure-capitalists-moving-mt-fuji-lyrics https://genius.com/Adventure-capitalists-moving-mt-fuji-lyri... but it's not the same reading the lyrics, you really need to hear his voice
- makeitdouble 1y agoAt the same time, asking them to solve social problems with money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the way forward either. Very aptly, the Manhattan Project or Space Race weren't aimed at the improvement of mankind per se. Motivation was a lot more specific and down to earth.
- BrenBarn 1y ago> At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the way forward either. Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money and just spread it around.
- ed_elliott_asc 1y agoIt’s all a bit depressing that we have the ability to do so much as a species but we don’t work together.
- TesterVetter 1y ago
- tzury 1y agoDo you need any more signs, or is it clear now? For me the Meta storm of billions in hiring was enough to start selling any tech giant related stock. It is about to crash, harder than ever.
- raphinou 1y agoI thought that when Apple reached a market cap of 1 trillion, but here we are today.... I since then abandoned any such prediction, even if i share your feeling
- anon191928 1y agoit's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a lot in the system. I mean debt
- tossandthrow 1y agoHard numbers for market cap is a difficult measure - Apples price earnings is 33 currently, which is high but not over high. Ie. Apple has revenue to back their market cap. The issue with high salaries is that there is a latent assumption that these people provide the multiples in additional value. That they are so smarter than everyone else. This is simply not true, and will lead to a competitive disadvantage.
- therealdrag0 1y agoWhy aren’t they smarter than others?
- tossandthrow 1y agoProbabiliatically 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.
- therealdrag0 1y ago
- monero-xmr 1y agoThere are sports stars who are paid similarly - rare talent that is in demand. Luckily there aren’t “software unions” like there are players’ unions to cap the max payment. Any left wing / socialist person on HN should be ecstatic - literally applauding with grins on their faces - that workers are extracting such sums out of the capitalist class. The hate for these salaries is mind boggling to me, and shows a lot of opposition to labor being paid what they are due is more about envy than class consciousness
- ggm 1y agoWhat percentage of the income is going towards funding future socialism? Because if it's not funding the revolution (peaceful or otherwise) why exactly would a leftist applaud these salaries?
- Der_Einzige 1y agoYou didn't read marx and the person above you clearly did. Marx hated the bourgeoisie (business owners, including petite-bourgeoisie AKA small business owners) and loved the proletariat - including the extremely skilled or well paid proletarians. Marx also hated the lumpen-proletariet - AKA prostitutes, homeless, etc.
- ggm 1y agoOne of my favourite Marx reminiscences is how his colleagues tried to buy him some IPR to provide for his wellbeing in later life: patent rights. Literally rent seeking on innovation. I'm not sure if it's in Emile Burns biography. What I did or didn't read is alas occluded from you. The Masereel illustrated woodcuts on a recent edition of the manifesto are wonderful.
- anabab 1y agowait-wait-wait. So a SWE investing in VT is just a well-skilled proletarian owning a share of the global means of production? is this communism already?
- lawik 1y ago
- BrenBarn 1y agoIt's good to at least see them call out wealth concentration as a driving factor here. The reason companies are paying insane amounts of money is that companies have insane amounts of money.
- andrewstuart 1y ago[flagged]
- khazhoux 1y agoGood for him. Unfortunately, though, what I have seen is that luminaries like this never match their external accomplishment once inside. I have names I saw firsthand but it would be rude to share. A couple of exceptions come to mind. It seems Marc Levoy has been as effective pushing imaging technology inside BigCo's as he was at Stanford Research, e.g. But more often it's one-hit wonders.
- meekaaku 1y agowhy 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.
- ehnto 1y agoThey do bat an eyelid, many leagues even introduce salary caps in order to quell the negative side effects of insane salaries in sports.
- meekaaku 1y agook maybe bat an eyelid, but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.
- parineum 1y agoYou must not follow sports very close. Every time a young supports signs his first big deal, people freak out and compare it to the last superstar's deal. "Young players getting too much money before they earned it" is a trope at this point.
- IncreasePosts 1y agoSalary 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.
- ehnto 1y agoNo 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.
- pseudo0 1y agoFunding is so plentiful right now that they are really competing with acquihire rates. That amount might sound crazy as straight salary, it comes with multi-year golden handcuffs and avoids having to buy them out for billions if they go start their own endeavor.
- mizzao 1y agoFor this one, it appears to be something along the lines of $250M in RSUs vesting over 4 years with $100M of it in the first year (almost a seed round per week!)
- dave333 1y agoIt's still peanuts compared to what owners make when their startup goes big. Seems reasonable that there's still room for small startups in AI with smarter approaches that don't require Manhattan project scale at a big company. Whether successful startups should sell out to big companies or become one themselves is the 64 billion question.
- teekert 1y agoInterestingly about 190.000 is what our prime minister makes and where public service salaries are capped here in the Netherlands. Edit oops, knowledge was outdated, it’s about 270.000.
- NHQ 1y agoThis is all about industrial robotics. In order to train robotics AI, Zuckyrberg must create realistic "embodied" farmvilles for users to play. This is likely the only path to robotics for facebook, hence the ballistic spending.
- yahoozoo 1y agoNot to make less of the guy, but aside from being a winner of a paper contest, the other ventures do not seem very novel: a startup to create AI agents that can use the Internet? Seems…common.
- merelysounds 1y agohttps://archive.is/t9HRT https://archive.is/t9HRT
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- siva7 1y agoOk people, is this for real like are these detached IC roles or are these articles talking about executive rolles filled by a.i. researchers?
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- Avicebron 1y agoAs far as I know it's only one guy that got this offer, https://mattdeitke.com/ https://mattdeitke.com/ (aside from the others who had the mythical 100 million dollar poaching package).
- flappyeagle 1y agoSource: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+ packages They are IC roles for the most part
- mr90210 1y agoAre you aware of the terms of such offers? I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially contingent upon achieving certain milestones.
- flappyeagle 1y agoEven amongst the packages, there is a range. One example package was 100 guaranteed up to 250 based on milestones and incentives over five years
- coderatlarge 1y agothey are executive roles in the sense that you are required to profitably allocate a scarce perishable resource (gpu time) way more expensive than any regular engineer’s time.
- flappyeagle 1y ago
- smokel 1y agoIt's similar to how, near the end of a Monopoly game, a player might indiscriminately hand over a stash of $100 bills to acquire Mediterranean Avenue, even though the property is mortgaged.
- mathgeek 1y agoWhich analogy(s) are you going for? The world is about to end so money is essentially worthless? The players with all the money are going to move on to something else soon? The game ceased to be fun for anyone so they all want to find other things to do? I assume you are going for “there are no more useful resources to acquire so those with all the resources overpay just to feel like they own those last few they don’t yet own”.
- smokel 1y agoI was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a game.
- qgin 1y agoI think the idea is the end of the game is nearing (AGI) and specific dollar amounts mean less than the binary outcome of getting there first.
- tough 1y agoif we get AGI and a post-scarcity age what makes these people think they -reaching- AGI will make them kings. seems like governments will have a thing to say about who's able to run that AGI or not. GPU's run on datacenters which exist in countries
- ElevenLathe 1y agoYes but countries are run by governments, which are composed of people, who can be bribed. If you believe that AI will make you the richest person in human history, you presumably can see that the problem of government can be solved with enough money.
- fidotron 1y agoGood for those involved being offered such packages, but it really does raise the question of what exactly those offering them are so afraid of. For example, Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style competitor, but it's hard to see how such a thing could emerge from the current social media landscape.
- MichaelZuo 1y agoThey just want the best, and they’re afraid of having second rates, B-players, etc., causing a bozo explosion. That seems like all the motivation that’s needed. Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?
- lores 1y agoJust like in football, buying all the best players pretty much guarantees failure as egos and personal styles clash and take precedence over team achievement. The only reasons one would do that are fear, vanity, and stupidity, and those have to be more important than getting value for the extraordinary amounts of money invested.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoYeah, pretty much agree. The only case where this may have made sense - but more for an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the transformer architecture, had made a number of architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus had a track record of being able to wring performance out of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of money.
- dekhn 1y agoNoam was already one of Google's top AI researchers and a personal friend of Jeff Dean (head of Google AI, at least in title). He worked on some of the early (~2002) search systems at Google and patented some of their most powerful technoloigies at the time- which were critical in making Google Search a product that was popular, and highly profitable.
- firesteelrain 1y agoWhen will the bubble pop?
- mr90210 1y agoI think we’d need a major war or a pandemic of sorts because we have become pretty good at maintaining such bubble inflated. Whenever and however it comes, it’s going to be a bloodbath because we haven’t had a proper burst since 2008. I don’t count 2020.
- nl 1y agoEventually people might consider that just maybe... it's not a bubble...
- firesteelrain 1y agoI just don’t think the industry is moatless. Where there is a moat in my opinion is airgap because few are pursuing this and not everyone wants their data in the Cloud.
- DonsDiscountGas 1y ago2000 was a bubble, and yet the internet continued to eat the world after it popped. I expect we'll see something similar
- impossiblefork 1y agoThere is definitely a bubble though. Tesla has 28 times larger market cap than other well-run competitors, for example, and there's a bunch of other firms with similarly crazy numbers. AI is great and it's the future, and a bunch of people will probably eventually turn it into very powerful systems able to solve industrially important maths and software development problems, but that doesn't meant they'll make huge money from that.
- mattlondon 1y agoWhen more than 1 company has "AGI", or whatever we're calling it, and people realise it is not just a license to print money. Some people are rightly pointing out that for quite a lot of things right now we probably already have AGI to a certain extent. Your average AI is way better than the average schmuck on the street in basically anything you can think of - maths, programming, writing poetry, world languages, music theory. Sure there are outliers where AI is not as good as a skilled practitioner in foo, but I think the AGI bar is about being "about as good as the average human" and not showing complete supremacy in every niche. So far the world has been disrupted sure, but not ended. ASI of course is the next thing, but that's different.
- tomhow 1y agoAt $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765193 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)
- ivape 1y agoAt those prices they have to be hiring god gifted talent. I can’t imagine that being just a regular academic grinder with top grades. Arod made $250 million and it was considered huge news.
- gosub100 1y agoaww, they can't be sleazy CEO types who "make number go up" for 2-3 years and leave with a golden parachute?
- ivape 1y agoNo, it’s a 24-year old: https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lure-24-year-old-ai-whiz-kid-we-have-reached-the-climax-of-revenge-of-the-nerds/ https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lur...
- normie3000 1y agoHow can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y agoGet a PhD in a related field like math or computer science.
- seanbarry 1y agoAnd have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge of AI research.
- coderatlarge 1y agoactually applied math or statistics.
- coderatlarge 1y agoit also helps if you happen to know a bunch of openai trade secrets.
- kergonath 1y agoThat is unfortunately far from enough. The majority end up doing ok but nowhere near this much money.
- lossolo 1y agoThere are millions of people with PhDs in math or computer science, and none of them earn that kind of salary. Just like there are Usain Bolts and Michael Phelpses in the world of sports, there are similarly exceptional individuals in every field.
- beau_g 1y agoThese $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.
- dmurray 1y agoWhat really, private industry pays top performing individuals more than the government ever did?
- BSOhealth 1y agoThese figures are for a very small number of potential people. This leaves out that frontier AI is being developed by an incredibly small number of extremely smart people who have migrated between big tech, frontier AI, and others. Yes, the figures are nuts. But compare them to F1 or soccer salaries for top athletes. A single big name can drive billions in that context at least, and much more in the context of AI. $50M-$100M/year, particularly when some or most is stock, is rational.
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- AIPedant 1y agoA very major difference is that top athletes bring in real tangible money via ticket / merch sales and sponsorships, whereas top AI researchers bring in pseudo-money via investor speculation. The AI money is far more likely to vanish.
- brandall10 1y agoIt's best to look at this as expected value. A top AI research has the potential to bring in a lot more $$ than a top athlete, but of course there is a big risk factor on top of that.
- jgalt212 1y agoIf you imagine hard enough, you can expect anything. e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
- brandall10 1y agoSure, but the idea these hires could pay out big is within the realm of actual reality, even if AGI itself remains a pipe dream. It’s not like AI hasn’t already had a massive impact on global commerce and markets.
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- unyttigfjelltol 1y agoI take this as a contrarian signal that Meta has hit serious roadblocks improving their AI despite massive data advantages and are throwing a bunch of "Hail Mary" desperation passes to achieve meaningful further progress.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> I take this as a contrarian signal that Meta has hit serious roadblocks improving their AI despite massive data advantages Just a thought: Assuming that Meta's AI is actually good. Could it rather be that having access to a massive amount of data does not bring that much of a business value (in this case particularly for training AIs)? Evidence for my hypothesis: if you want to gain a deep knowledge about some complicated specific scientific topic, you typically don't want to read a lot of shallow texts tangentially related to this topic, but the few breakthrough papers and books of the smartest mind who moved the state of art in the respective area. Or some of the few survey monographs of also highly smart people who work in the respective area who have a vast overview about how these deep research breakthroughs fit into the grander scheme of things.
- ignoramous 1y ago> Assuming that Meta's AI is actually good. Could it rather be that having access to a massive amount ... Most would say, vibe-wise Llama 4 fell flat in face of Qwen & friends.
- master_crab 1y agoThere’s been a lot of research on the necessity of singular geniuses. The general consensus (from studies on Nobel Prizes and simultaneous patent rates) is that advances tend to be moved by the research community as a whole. You can get that technical or scientific context for a lot less than $250 million per head.
- hooloovoo_zoo 1y agoYes but you can also instantly advance to the state of that person’s former company’s research state which cost them way more than 250M.
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoWonder 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 shares with insiders is different from his public persona. I can't help but think that the structure of this kinda hints at there being a bit of a scam-y element, where a bunch of smart people are trying to pump some rich people out of as much money as possible, with questionable chances at making it back. Imagine that the people on The List had all the keys needed to build AGI already if they put their knowledge together, what action do you think they would take?
- walterbell 1y ago> Imagine.. had all the keys needed .. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.
- jodrellblank 1y ago> "Does Zucc have a strong vision, leadership, and management skills to actually push and enable these people to achieve maximum success?" I suggest we saw a clear demonstration of that with the Metaverse and the answer is no, but more intensely than two letters can communicate.
- baobabKoodaa 1y agoI agree with you, BUT most of these AI folks have intrinsic motivation for this AI stuff that is on a whole different level compared to their motivation for building the Metaverse. So even though Zuck isn't particularly effective at motivating people or whatnot, these people will be motivated regardless.
- xorcist 1y agoWhat 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.
- dmezzetti 1y agoAs the margins shrink between the capabilities of each of these models, those who specialize in retrieval / context engineering will be the next frontier. Those who provide the most relevant information to a model will win the day.
- ramesh31 1y agoThere has to be more at play here. Was this some kind of acquihire? No 24 year old in the history of 24 year olds has been worth $250 million on the basis of their intellectual merit. Even granting that they were some kind of one-off super genius, no single human is that smart or productive, to be worth the bankroll of a literal army of PhDs. He has to be bringing more to the table.
- soulofmischief 1y agoLol. I was leading development of a project that did everything his project Vy does and much more, before my company experienced a hostile takeover and I was squeezed out so they could pivot to a shitass AI sex bot company that ultimately ran through our warchest and failed. That was back in 2022-2023. Maybe I need to get one of these recruitment agents.
- thefaux 1y agoHonestly, I think a lot of this is as much marketing as it is about actual value. This helps the industry narrative about how transformative the tech is. These inflated comp packages perfectly match the inflated claims around the tech. "See this tech is so incredible we are paying people 1 BILLION dollars!" These types of comp packages also seem designed to create a kind of indentured servitude for the researchers. Instead of forming their own rival companies that might actually compete with facebook, facebook is trying to foreclose that possibility. The researchers get the money, but they are also giving up autonomy. Personally, no amount of money would induce me to work for Zuckerberg.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 1y agoIs there anything one can do to get in on this? Did I have to be at Stanford getting a PhD 10 years ago, or can I somehow still get on the frontier now as a generic software engineer who's pretty good at learning things, and end up working at one of these labs? Or is it impossible to guess exactly what is going to be desirable a few years from now that might get you in the game at that caliber?
- akomtu 1y agoYou need to be a someone who has a high chance of creating an AI-centric company.
- robbomacrae 1y agoAlright you twisted my arm im in. Already did a couple AI centric projects. HMU let's do this. Personally I want a bazaar for AI. not sure I like the future being decided by the current crop of billionaires.
- turnsout 1y agoI'll give you two completely different and conflicting opinions! Bear case: No, there's nothing you can do. These are exceptionally rare hires driven by FOMO at the peak of AI froth. If any of these engineers are successful at creating AGI/superintelligence within five years, then the market for human AI engineers will essentially vanish overnight. If they are NOT successful at creating AGI within five years, the ultra high-end market for human AI engineers will also vanish, because companies will no longer trust that talent is the key. Bull case: Yes, you should go all in and rebrand as a self-proclaimed AI genius. Don't focus on commanding $250M in compensation (although 24, Matt Deitke has been doing AI/ML since high school). Instead, focus on optimizing or changing any random part of the transformer architecture and publishing an absolutely inscrutable paper about the results. Make a glossy startup page that makes some bold claims about how you'll utilize your research to change the game. If you're quick, you can ride the wave of FOMO and start leveling up. Although AGI will never happen, the opportunities will remain as we head into the "plateau of productivity."
- tempodox 1y agoTo me it's just fascinating to see how much further you can pump up this hype bubble. My pop corn reserves need a refill.
- dekhn 1y agoWhen I was a kid in the 80s I read the book "Hackers" and it describes the most successful people in the industry as having "Croesus" wealth: counted in the tens of millions of dollars.
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- noobermin 1y agoWhen the crash hits, it will hit hard.
- pizzafeelsright 1y agoThese big winners could retire their entire social circle.
- ofjcihen 1y agoPeople are focused on the skills these people must possess or the experience. Chances are good that while they’re competitive for sure, what they really have that landed them these positions is connections and the ability to market themselves well.
- martin-t 1y agoOf course, their job is to make their own job redundant. If they are true believers, this is the last paycheck they might ever get. After that, it's manual labor like the plebs or having enough savings to ~~last them the rest of their lives~~ invest and "earn" passive income by taking a portion of the value produced by people who still do actual work.
- oldstrangers 1y agoThis strikes me as "end game" type behavior. These companies see the writing on the wall, and are willing to throw everything they have left to retain relevance in the coming post-AGI world. To me I'm more alarmed than I am shocked at the pay packages.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y agoThey're being paid to not do their own startup and become competition.
- amelius 1y agoNot sure if that's really smart. With $250M they can easily buy their own competitive AI compute rig ...
- airspresso 1y agoKeep in mind that these compensation packages are mostly stock that doesn't unlock for years, so no, can't buy an AI compute rig today with that.
- apparent 1y agoThis 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, musicians, and other entertainers that operate on a global scale make so much more money now than they did 100 years ago. They are serving a market that is thousands of times larger than their predecessors did, and the pay is commensurately larger.
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- mi_lk 1y ago> winner-take-all (most) > 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 Is it? Gemini is arguably better than OAI in most cases but I'm not sure it's as popular among general public
- apparent 1y agoI don't think there's a consensus on this. I have found Gemini to be so-so, and the UX is super annoying when you run out of your pro usage. IME, there's no way to have continuity to a lower-tier model, which makes is a huge hassle. I basically never use it anymore.
- decimalenough 1y agoIn other words, what matters is not just which one is "best"?
- apparent 1y agoIf the Google model was 50% better than OpenAI I would have bought a subscription, which would moot the UX issue. But IME it isn't discernibly better at all, let alone 50% better.
- bgwalter 1y agoIt is sort of an aquihire: Mr. Deitke, who recently dropped out of a computer science Ph.D. program at the University of Washington, had moonlighted at a Seattle A.I. lab, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. There, he led the development of a project called Molmo, an A.I. chatbot that juggles images, sounds and text — the kind of system that Meta is trying to build. Probably Zuck is trying to prop up his failed Metaverse with "AI". $250 million is nothing compared to what has already been sunk into that Spruce Goose.
- SamvitJ 1y agoOne 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 models that he built & released as an academic [2], has direct bearing on Zuck's vision for personalized, multimodal AI at Meta. - He had to be poached from something, in this case, his own startup, where in the best case, his equity could be worth a large multiple of his Meta offer. $250M likely exceeded the expected value of success, in his view, at the startup. There was also probably a large premium required to convince him to leave his own thing (which he left his PhD to start) to become a hired hand for Meta. Sources: [1] https://mattdeitke.com/ https://mattdeitke.com/ [2] https://allenai.org/blog/molmo https://allenai.org/blog/molmo
- naveen99 1y agoMolmo caught my eye also a while ago.
- andyjensen 1y agoSame except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree
- tantalor 1y ago> could be worth... Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> What's the likelihood of that? Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)
- siscia 1y agoAlso, do you have a better way to spend that money?
- atleastoptimal 1y agoSo what happens when they achieve AGI? Will a benevolent network of vastly smarter-than-human intelligences insist on maintaining the wealth hierarchies that humans had before AGI arrived? Isn't the point of AGI removing scarcity? I worry that those who became billionaires in the AI boom won't want the relative status of their wealth to become moot once AGI hits. Most likely this will come in the form of artificial barriers to using AI that, for ostensible safety reasons, makes it prohibitively difficult for all but the wealthiest or AGI-lab adjacent social circles to use. This will cause a natural exacerbation of the existing wealth disparities, as if you have access to a smarter AI than everyone else, you can leverage your compute to be tactically superior in any domain with a reward. All we can hope for is a general benevolence and popular consensus that avoids a runaway race to the bottom effect as a result of all this.
- catmanjan 1y agoHow can anyone still believe the AGI scam
- atleastoptimal 1y agoIf you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.
- godelski 1y agoI wouldn't call 7-10 years a scam, but I would call it low odds. It is pretty hard to be accurate on predictions of a 10 year window. But I definitely think 2027 and 2030 predictions are a scam. Majority of researchers think it is further away than 10 years, if you are looking at surveys from the AI conferences rather than predictions in the news.
- atleastoptimal 1y agoThe thing is, AI researchers have continually underestimated the pace of AI progress https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to-arrive/ https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to... >One way to reduce selection effects is to look at a wider group of AI researchers than those working on AGI directly, including in academia. This is what Katja Grace did with a survey of thousands of recent AI publication authors. >In 2022, they thought AI wouldn’t be able to write simple Python code until around 2027. >In 2023, they reduced that to 2025, but AI could maybe already meet that condition in 2023 (and definitely by 2024). >Most of their other estimates declined significantly between 2023 and 2022. >The median estimate for achieving ‘high-level machine intelligence’ shortened by 13 years. Basically every median timeline estimate has shrunk like clockwork every year. Back in 2021 people thought it wouldn't be until 2040 or so when AI models could look at a photo and give a human-level textual description of its contents. I think is reasonable to expect that the pace of "prediction error" won't change significantly since it's been on a straight downward trend over the past 4 years, and if it continues as such, AGI around 2028-2030 is a median estimate.
- omnee 1y agoZuck made him and offer that couldn't be refused. But neither salaries or hype or hope are what AI should be measured against. LLM based AI should be measured against previous technological revolutions, in terms of sustained real income growth and ideally real income growth per person. Right now capital expenses are responsible for most of AI's economic impacts, as seen by the infrastructure spend contributing more to GDP than consumer spending this year.
- exasperaited 1y agoAnd yet this one guy's deal possibly represents 0.5% of the total profit that everyone except Nvidia is making out of this wave of AI. Maybe even more.
- matt_cogito 1y agoAm I reading this correctly: an AI researcher might get paid roughly the same amount of money as the largest transfer of a soccer player in history (Neymar at €220M)? There is hope for humanity. Jokes aside, how and why?
- lionkor 1y agoHow: Meta has the money because they presumably have infinite margins. Why: Its a bubble.
- TrackerFF 1y agoWhy: Zuck knows exactly one trick, and that is to throw money at a problem. I don't know what the current tally on his metaverse fiasco is, but if he can spend billions upon billions on that, then poaching AI researchers and engineers for a fraction of that isn't really out of character.
- thatguysaguy 1y agoAt least part of is is that the capex for LLM training is so high. It used to be that compute was extremely cheap compared to staff, but that's no longer the case for large model training.
- bawana 1y agocant wait for him to come out with his own energy drink
- nrmitchi 1y agoMy mental model is looking at all of these situations as pre-emptive aquihires. Meta can make 40 of these hires (over a number of years) and still be in a better place than feeling like they have to make a single $10B acquisition (if they could even make it at that point)
- mizzao 1y agoEven if what you say is true, people don't add in this way. They still need to be managed, motivated, and somehow made to work together toward something of value. Microsoft Research had hundreds of big brains for decades that all worked independently and added little of value to the business.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoBased on the productivity gains in the last 50 years, there are certainly engineers worth $100,000,000 that had no idea the impact they were going to have on the world. We are in a time where the impact can be measured more quickly, so good for the engineers taking advantage of this.
- yen223 1y agoIf Linus Torvalds got paid based on his impact on the world he might just be the world's richest man
- mmmBacon 1y agoIf you think of it, what is Meta going to do with AI? Their business model is ads. Maybe AI can improve ads some. For Meta, how does the billions spent on AI impact their bottom line? The reality is that if AI training requirements keep scaling based on Chinchilla scaling, there is going to be massive consolidation in training due to the scale that’s going to be required. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with Zuck running nuclear reactors. Already AI models are the fastest depreciating assets ever created. Moreover Meta is behind the AI curve so they are desperate to catch up. But desperate for what?
- tamimio 1y agoJust like few years ago “blockchain contract auditors”, and before that “big data bla bla”, and before that “cybersecurity xyz”, you always have people who try to grift as much as possible from the ${current bubble}.
- sega_sai 1y agoI am sure people here will disagree with me, but I do not think that the 250M$ packages makes sense. In my opinion nobody is is worth 1000s times more the other people in the same field. A way to deal with this is through the tax system that would make it economically inefficient to have insane pay packages. Obviously that will not happen (especially in the US).
- brink 1y agoAll you did was offer your arbitrary opinion without any supporting argument or anecdotal evidence and suggested we should fix it with more taxes. If you're going to offer an opinion contrary to the majority, you should at least have a convincing argument why.
- wiseowise 1y agoWhy not put people in gulag? Ultimate democratization means. A plate of chow for everyone.
- ghushn3 1y agoI 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.
- joshdavham 1y agoThis is a great point, but some passions fundamentally require other people and capital. These AI researchers fundamentally need access to tons of compute, data and engineers in order to pursue their passion.
- shostack 1y agoEh, depending on the stress of the work, how much I enjoyed it, etc, $250M can buy a lot of convenience in life that lets you do it for as long as you want and that can be truly transformational generational wealth.
- Buttons840 1y agoYou'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.
- recipe19 1y agoThese 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.
- joshdavham 1y agoI'm sure a very small number of these AI researchers will be worth the pay (and then some), but I imagine the marjority of them will only manage to make marginal gains in the projects they work on. I guess it's a little like venture capital, where the majority of the startups that you fund end up flopping, but a small number of them provide returns that make up for all of the losses.
- glitchc 1y agoWhat a sensationalized article. NY Times should be embarrassed for publishing this drivel. One superstar researcher does not equate an industry. Perhaps NY Times should consider paying its journalists the same wage as Pulitzer prize winners.
- mrcwinn 1y agoBut did they remember to mention pre-planned vacation dates? Maybe not so smart after all.
- __lbracket__ 1y ago[dead]
- j7ake 1y agoIf these people are making that much, I wonder what is the compensation for people like LeCunn.
- seydor 1y agothis is the nature of capitalism, capital begets more capital and the returns are exponential, however our societies, economies, and tax systems remain linear. We never really adjusted because it's complicated. To me it's obvious that these extremes create perverse incentives, so the people who will take those jobs won't amount to much. I m willing to bet that Meta's AI efforts are doomed from now on.
- ipnon 1y agoMoney itself amounts to a lot. At $250M you're already able to influence elections. So we might expect American politics for the rest of the 2020s to be broadly accelerationist and pro Big Token, even more so than it is currently. SV being the keystone of growth in America means SV ideals will have massive power in Washington.
- habosa 1y agoI don’t like this because it inspires my relatives to keep sending me links to these stories and asking why I’m not going to work at Meta and getting my billions. Mark, please do this stuff quietly so I can continue in my quiet mediocrity.
- matco11 1y agoI love basketball, soccer, and tennis… but you guys have no idea how powerful I have found to share stories like this with my young kids. Yes, I want them to excel in sports, but these articles provide a crucial counterweight to the all-too-common narrative that becoming a pro athlete is the ultimate dream. Instead, these stories show that being exceptional in STEM isn’t just something you do because you are curious, you find it interesting, you enjoy it (all great motivators), or to please parents and teachers (generally, probably, lesser quality motivators): these stories show that being exceptional in STEM can open doors to exciting, high-impact careers. It’s been amazing to watch my kids begin to reframe STEM not as the “sensible” thing to do, but as something genuinely cool, aspirational, and full of opportunity.
- saagarjha 1y agoYou can have an exciting, high impact career without being paid hundreds of millions of dollars.
- nobodywillobsrv 1y agoWhat are the actual data on this now? A lot of people I know could be doing AI and I don't think there is that much special in the experience but yes a few years of correct experience matters I suppose. But it does seem bizarre ... Is buying a chance at improving by months of time currently worth billions? Maybe. It just seems very short cited right now. Or should I and my friends all be targeting 7-8 figure jobs?
- Joel_Mckay 1y agoI recall a time where a post doc spent in graph theory ML was the worst career choice for students. Make sure you get paid in cash. =3
- lolive 1y ago#jokeAhead #beCareful Such a big salary for a non-management position! Things are getting really wrong in this iteration of the US ultraliberalism.
- thom 1y agoPresumably this is a sign that Zuck has brought forward his estimate of (at least some significant step towards) AGI? Feels like we’re missing several novelties on that critical path. I would have thought you’d do better casting a wider, more diverse net if you have money to burn.
- Voultapher 1y agoSlightly fixed title: "One A.I. researcher is negotiating a $250M pay package in made up money that Meta can produce by typing zeros into a spreadsheet." Paying with stock is a neat option for companies that are projected to grow - the very reason why all of big tech desperately wants to be perceived as growing - since it doesn't cost them anything, since they can dilute existing stock holdings at will by claiming the thing they are buying with new made up stock will make the company that much richer. So you as a potential investor should ask yourself, will this one employee make Meta worth $255M more? Assuming they are paying $5M in cash and the rest in stock.
- tonyhart7 1y agoYeah 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, money, resources they have tbh
- Voultapher 1y agoI 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 to spend any cash to do this. It's literally money they can print whenever they want.
- hollerith 1y agoSince Meta Platforms' stock is highly liquid, it does not matter much (except maybe for computing taxes) whether Meta sells stock and gives 100M in cash to the employee or gives the employee stock, which the employee then converts into cash. In either case, the fact that the stock was created is reported to investors, and investors know that the creation reduces the value of every existing share of Meta, which is the feedback mechanism which restricts how much money or value Meta can get out of the creation of new shares of its stock.
- mupuff1234 1y agoBasically an anti trust loophole - why but a company and face regulations when you can buy the people?
- JCM9 1y agoGenAI Bubble.
- IAmGraydon 1y agoThe amount of egg that will need to be removed from faces if AGI turns out to be a pipe dream is going to be unbelievable.
- wnc3141 1y agomy sibling is an AI researcher at Apple. He still flies Frontier airlines.
- missedthecue 1y agoHow are these pay packages structured? If Meta stock is flat for the next 10 years (like microsoft from 2001-2011) do these guys walk away with a bunch of worthless options? I have to imagine it's not pure cash wired to their Wells Fargo checking account.
- JonChesterfield 1y agoPublic companies do restricted stock units, not options to buy illiquid stock. Every N months another chunk becomes available to sell (and M% of it immediately evaporates as income tax).
- WealthVsSurvive 1y agoWe should take all the money away from Petey T and the treason bunch, then.
- aagha 1y agoIt's almost certain these pay packages aren't being negotiated, but are instead ways for players (e.g., sama) to keep their talent from leaving their current positions. Oh, you got a $8M offer from Meta? That's it? Interesting... They're offering Jane $250M.