They are IC roles for the most part
I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially contingent upon achieving certain milestones.
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”.
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
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.
Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?
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.
Anyhow, with the Metaverse as a flop, and apparently having self-assessed Meta's current LLM efforts as unsatisfactory, it seems Zuck may want to rescue his reputation by throwing money at it to try to make his next big gamble a winner. It seems a bit irrational given that other companies, and countries, have built SOTA LLMs without needing to throw NBA/NFL/rockstar money around.
It is the same thing in sports as well. There will only ever be one Michael Jordan one Lionel Messi one Tiger Woods one Magnus Carlsen. And they are paid a lot because they are worth it.
>> 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
Meta moved on from facebook a while back.It has been years since I last logged into facebook and hardly anybody I know actually post anything there. Its a relic of the past.
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.
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.
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.
I've gotten some great results out of LLM's, but thats often because the prompt was well crafted, and numerous iterations were performed based on my expertise.
You couldn't get that out of the LLM without that person most of the time.
These models don't understand anything similar to reality and they can be confused by all sorts of things.
This can obviously be managed and people have achieved great things with them, including this IMO stuff, but the models are despite their capability very, very far from AGI. They've also got atrocious performance on things like IQ tests.
I think a possible scenario is that we see huge open source advances in training and inference efficiency that ends up making some of the mega-investments in AI infrastructure look silly.
What will probably ‘save’ the mega-spending is (unfortunately!) the application of AI to the Forever Wars for profit.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lur...
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.
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 (including 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.
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?
.. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.
merelysounds•2h ago