At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/at-250-million-top-ai-salaries-dwarf-those-of-the-manhattan-project-and-the-space-race/

by majkinetor • 12 months ago

63 15 12 months ago

arstechnica.com

physicsguy• 12 months ago

Big difference was that at that time people were doing things both for the race itself but also because ideologically they believed in the mission.

im_down_w_otp• 12 months ago

I think people are ideologically aligned with the mission today. It's just that grifting off yet-another-hype-cycle is the mission.

eviks2• 12 months ago

A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.

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...

bgwalter• 12 months ago

The author of the article appears to think that Oppenheimer's intellectual contributions were superior to those of the "AI" implementers.

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.

fxtentacle• 12 months ago

A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.

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 ;)

4gotunameagain• 12 months ago

The fact does not contradict economic analyses, it points out what a great shift there has been.

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.

eviks2• 12 months ago

for the perceived common greater good

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

vinni2• 12 months ago

Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention.

Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

chii• 12 months ago

you misunderstood the parent post - "connected" is meant to be understood as "privately capture", rather than participation.

Oppenheimer's value generation is not captured by him, but by the taxpayers (and whoever is the funder of his endeavours).

roenxi• 12 months ago

Those two examples are government-run projects and in the case of the Manhattan project were part of a scheme with the main purpose of murdering people at a mass scale. The question there was more how much would we have had to pay those people not to do what they did.

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.

mhh__• 12 months ago

In some ways it's a stupid comparison because back then people didn't take money that seriously because the state still knew how to hire serious talent and reward them with status instead.

tomhow• 12 months ago

Now on front page:

A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250 Million Pay Packages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766758

We let that article take precedence on the front page, as the top commenter on this thread makes a good point that the comparisons to the Manhattan Project and Space Race can be regarded a red herring and diminish the weight of the article. The NYT story on the front page focuses on the central topic of comp offers to A.I. talent.

dang• 12 months ago

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766758 (except the ones responding to the title bit)

daft_pink• 12 months ago

Those were government projects.

Think about all the useful and necessary things that professional athlete's salaries dwarf.

I feel that at least these researchers are getting paid their perceived value instead of all that value being absorbed by FANNG.

I think AI research is sort of like cutting a diamond, where every few percent more efficient could result in huge sums saved in infrastructure costs for training and inference and Capex.

At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race

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