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.
https://soundcloud.com/adventurecapitalists/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
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.
Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money and just spread it around.
But the promises turned into stock boosting lies; the environmental good into vote buying for climate change deniers, and space exploration into low earth cell-towers.
Those years were a long time ago for me. I’ve been arguing musk is a snake oil salesman since at least 2014. I lost friends over it at the time, people who were very heavily invested into musk, both financially and for some reason, emotionally.
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.
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.
When OpenAI was making waves the first time, then Google launched their neutered incapable competitor, I thought it is “over” for Google because why would anyone use search anymore (apart from the 1% of use cases where it gives better results faster), and clearly they are incapable of building good new products anymore…
and now they are there with the best LLMs and they are at the top of the pack again.
Billions of dollars in the bank, great developers, good connections to politicians and institutions mean that you are hard to replace even if you fumble it a couple of times.
I think the biggest confuser here is that there are really two games being played, the money game and the technology game. Investments in AI are going to be largely driven by speculation on their monetary outcome, not technological outcome. Whether or not the technology survives the Venture Capital Gauntlet, the investment bubble could still pop, and only the businesses that have real business models survive. Heaps of people lose their shirt to the tune of billions, yet we still have an AI powered future of some kind.
All this to say, you can both be certain AI is a valuable technology and also believe the economics around it right now are not founded in a clear reality. These are all bets on a future none of us can be sure of.
We're sailing uncharted waters, all bets are off.
EUR:USD has been rising for a reason.
It is indeed; those people hired at those salaries are not going to "produce" more than the people hired at normal salaries.
Because what we have now is a "good enough" so getting a 10x better LLM isn't going to produce a 10x increase in revenue (nevermind profit).
The problem is not "We need a better LLM" or "We need cheaper/faster generation". It's "We don't know how to make money of this".
That doesn't require engineers who can creat the next generation SOTA in AI, that requires business people who can spot solutions which simply needs tokens.
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
Because if it's not funding the revolution (peaceful or otherwise) why exactly would a leftist applaud these salaries?
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.
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.
I don't feel strongly about these salaries beyond them being an indication of deep dysfunction in the system. This is not healthy, for a market or for a society. No-one should be paid these amounts but I don't care about these developers because they don't run the system.
I've benefited from devs being paid well. Not that well. But same thing in concept.
A 1b $ anonymous software engineer is likely leading to 5000 more revenue than a 200k talented Ai engineer.
one would think that a talented academic/researcher getting a 1B salary would impress the socialist people but it doesn't because it was never about that. it was about bringing rich people down and not much else.
I'm guessing not, but both the AI expert and the CEO are agents for the owner class: it is owners like Elon and Sam Altman that are deciding to pay these huge salaries and they are doing it for the same reason that corporate boards of directors pay CEOs huge salaries: namely, to help the owners accumulate more capital.
Personal anecdote time. One of the people named in the press as having turned down one of these hyper-offers used to work in an adjacent team, same "pod" maybe, whatever adjacent. That person is crazy smart, stands out even among elite glory days FAANG types. Anyways they left and when back on the market I was part of the lobby to get them back at any price, had to run it fairly high up the flagpole (might have been Sheryl who had to sign off, maybe it was Mark).
Went on to make it back for the company a hundred fold the first year. Clearly a good choice to "pay over market".
Now it's a little comical for it to be a billion or whatever, that person was part of a clique of people at that level and there's a lot of "brand" going into a price tag like that: the people out of our little set who did compilers or whatever instead of FAIR are just as good and what is called "AI" now is frankly not that differentiated (the person in question maintained as much back in the day).
But a luck and ruthlessness hire like Zuckerberg on bended knee to a legitimate monster hacker and still getting dissed? Applause. I had Claude write a greentext for the amusement of my chums. I recommend it kek.
This gentleman now has an entirely different set of problems to everyone else. Do you think he will now go on to advocate for wealth equality, housing affordability, healthcare etc, or do you think he'll go buy some place nice away from his former problems and enjoy his (earned) compensation in peace?
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work. Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.
I’m earning up near $250 million a year, aren’t you? If not maybe time for a job jump.
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.
but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.
Are there 250 million AI specialists and the ones hired by Meta still come out on top?
Edit oops, knowledge was outdated, it’s about 270.000.
physicsguy•5h ago
im_down_w_otp•5h ago