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

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/technology/ai-researchers-nba-stars.html

by jrwan • 12 months ago

287 546 12 months ago

gedy• 12 months ago

I suppose I’d rather hire 250 bright kids with $1 million package each instead, but I suppose it gets pr.

Just 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• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

Ph.D. dropout.

p1esk8• 12 months ago

You 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• 12 months ago

The 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.

wiseowise7• 12 months ago

Would you get 250 William Ginter Riva’s or 1 Tony Stark?

https://marvelcinematicuniverse.fandom.com/wiki/William_Gint...

NHQ2• 12 months ago

Thats only 25M in 2025 dollars.

burnt-resistor2• 12 months ago

Still not enough to afford the house I grew up in in San Jose.

vivzkestrel• 12 months ago

and what exactly is this "whiz" kid capable of doing that you and I cant

beng-nl• 12 months ago

I have a feeling you’re missing this question:

and what exactly did this "whiz" kid do that you and I didn’t

wiseowise7• 12 months ago

If you need to ask this question – most likely he can do far more than you can ever do.

warofwords• 12 months ago

I 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

brcmthrowaway• 12 months ago

What am I doing with my life...

ed_elliott_asc2• 12 months ago

Imagine 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.

AndyKelley• 12 months ago

one of my favorite songs embodies this concept:

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

makeitdouble• 12 months 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.

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.

BrenBarn2• 12 months 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_asc2• 12 months ago

It’s all a bit depressing that we have the ability to do so much as a species but we don’t work together.

midnightclubbed• 12 months ago

For a few years it seemed like Tesla and SpaceX were those companies - reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, boosting clean transportation and solar, pushing forward space exploration.

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.

theshackleford4• 12 months ago

For a few years it seemed like Tesla

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.

jodrellblank4• 12 months ago

"In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.

We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

"Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990. In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm

tzury• 12 months ago

Do 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.

smokel3• 12 months ago

Or it might go up.

raphinou• 12 months ago

I 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

anon1919283• 12 months ago

it's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a lot in the system. I mean debt

tossandthrow5• 12 months ago

Hard 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.

serial_dev• 12 months ago

The fact is that the incumbents with all their money are in a good position to defend against anything and counterattack.

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.

Hikikomori• 12 months ago

Combined with the trump economy its going to be interesting. I pulled out in end of January when they were actually going forward with tariffs in the most stupid way possible.

jatora5• 12 months ago

Funny there's trillions of dollars in the span of two years literally pointing to the writing on the wall and you're so arrogant and blinded by cope that you can't see it. You legacy engineers really are something else.

saubeidl4• 12 months ago

Maybe it's the legacy capitalists that are really something else?

ehnto4• 12 months ago

You have exactly the same level of conviction toward an unknowable outcome, I think both of you would be better served by reading the middle ground instead of subscribing to a false dichotomy of boom or bust.

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.

simianwords7• 12 months ago

what does Meta hiring have to do with a crash? if anything it shows increase because of the amount of investment put into it.

tokioyoyo• 12 months ago

Where would put their money into though? It’s such a weird economy, especially with the expected decrease in younger population.

demiters• 12 months ago

Before an imminent recession you might want to focus on funds that primarily cover sectors that enjoy steady demand even during crisis, like utilities, consumer staples, healthcare, maybe some hedge against inflation like precious metals. I would avoid tech and luxuries and would definitely avoid crypto also. There is no historical data to show how it would perform during a serious recession (Bitcoin was basically born during the last one) but I doubt it would be pretty.

saubeidl4• 12 months ago

European defense stocks seem like a pretty good bet right now.

laardaninst• 12 months ago

Stock buybacks and cryptocurrency are ways to circumvent the Fed's monopoly on currency. The US is not a single monetary economy anymore, it's several. None of the economic analysis institutions know work anymore.

We're sailing uncharted waters, all bets are off.

em500• 12 months ago

That’s similar to what people on HN said a few decades ago when Google bought Youtube and Facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp for billions.

saubeidl4• 12 months ago

It might be time to sell your USD too, while you're at it. Don't think it won't take it all with it.

EUR:USD has been rising for a reason.

lelanthran• 12 months ago

It is about to crash, harder than ever.

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.

tropicalfruit• 12 months ago

It is about to crash, harder than ever.

and then immediately bounce back to higher than it was before

monero-xmr• 12 months ago

There 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

ggm2• 12 months ago

What 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_Einzige2• 12 months ago

You 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.

lawik• 12 months ago

Well I applaud their ability to get that bag. But in terms of raising the floor for a lot of people, this is not that.

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.

kgwgk• 12 months ago

People also complain about the high salaries of CEOs. A lot of opposition to labor being paid what they are due is more about envy than class consciousness.

jdefr895• 12 months ago

Yea because everyone knows CEOs just take credit for the work the real engineers and others do… I’d far prefer researchers or developers getting this kind of money instead of a CEO…

tossandthrow5• 12 months ago

That is not an appropriate comparison as sports stars(you write it yourself) is in the entertainment industry - they are paid for their talent.

A 1b $ anonymous software engineer is likely leading to 5000 more revenue than a 200k talented Ai engineer.

simianwords7• 12 months ago

you just described how it is the same thing

simianwords7• 12 months ago

it was never about rising salaries, it was always about upper middle class urbanites showing fake concern towards the lower class by disparaging people who earn more than them.

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.

jdefr895• 12 months ago

I know. For God sakes who will think of the poor billionaires for once! /saracasm

saagarjha9• 12 months ago

How exactly does one guy making a billion dollars help the lower class?

hollerith2• 12 months ago

Would you say that same thing about executives and CEOs?

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.

benreesman• 12 months ago

I don't get the down votes. Any good leftist likes seeing skilled workers having unskilled rentiers over the barrel.

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.

ehnto4• 12 months ago

I appreciate the sentiment but the issue is still really clear. This guy getting so much money hasn't made anything more equal, it's just added another individual to an elite class of wealth. Had these salaries been distributed across everyone as it is clearly affordable to do, it would be a different story.

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?

BrenBarn2• 12 months ago

It'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.

khazhoux• 12 months ago

Good 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.

meekaaku3• 12 months ago

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.

ehnto4• 12 months ago

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

meekaaku3• 12 months ago

ok maybe bat an eyelid,

but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.

IncreasePosts• 12 months ago

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.

mutatio• 12 months ago

Crab mentality, the closer proximity to your profession / place in society the more resentment/envy. This is a win for some of us in tech, it's just not us, so we cannot allow it! Article even mentions the age of "24" as if someone of that age is inherently undeserving.

quonn• 12 months ago

Ronaldo competes in a sport that has 250 million players (mostly for leisure purposes) worldwide, who often practice daily since childhood, and still comes out on top.

Are there 250 million AI specialists and the ones hired by Meta still come out on top?

therealdrag03• 12 months ago

Huh the pool being so small is exactly why they’re fought over. Theres tiering in research through papers and products built. Even if the tiering is wrong, if you can monopolize the talent you strike a blow to competitors.

meekaaku3• 12 months ago

I bet there are more professional footballers than AI researchers hence AI researchers will tend to get paid more.

Also much more people are affected by whatever AI is being developed/deployed than worldwide football viewers.

Top 5 football leagues have about 1.5billion monthly viewers. Top 5 AI companies (google, openai, meta etc) have far more monthly active users.

gherkinnn2• 12 months ago

My personal negativity stems from Meta in particular having a negative net impact on society. And no small one either. Everything Zuckerberg touches turns to poison (basically King Midas in reverse). And all that money, all that progress, is directed towards the detriment of everyone but a few.

In contrast, a skilled football player lands somewhere between neutral and positive, as at the very least they entertain millions of people. And I'm saying that as someone who finds football painfully dull.

jdcasale• 12 months ago

Anyone on earth can completely and totally ignore football and it will have zero consequences for their life.

The money here (in the AI realm) is coming a handful of oligarchs who are transparently trying to buy control of the future.

The difference between the two scenarios is... kinda obvious don't you think?

prewett• 12 months ago

I'm going with envy. Athletics is a completely different skill from software, and one that is looked down on by posters here, judging by the frequent use of "sportsball". "Sportsball" players make huge salaries? Whatever, not my thing, that's for normies. But when software researchers make 1000x my salary? Now it's more personal. Surely they are not 1000x as good as me. It seems unlikely that this guy is 1000x as skilled as the average senior developer, so there's some perceived unfairness, too.

But I counsel a different perspective: it's quite remunerative to be selling tulips when there's a mania on!

wiseowise7• 12 months ago

Surely they are not 1000x as good as me. It seems unlikely that this guy is 1000x as skilled as the average senior developer

Will never understand the logic. They is literally better than an average senior dev, if he has been offered 250m package.

cosmic_cheese• 12 months ago

It may be envy, but I’m still not sure a direct comparison makes much sense, given how much of a different creature engineering LLMs is from what most devs are doing.

I think negative feelings are coming from more of a “why are they getting paid so much to build a machine that’s going to wreck everything” sort of angle, which I find understandable.

etempleton2• 12 months ago

Sports teams pay Ronaldo, Messi, and Curry because they win games and that puts fans in seats and attracts sponsors that pay those teams money and turn a profit.

When someone had a successful business model that offsets the incredible costs let me know, but it is all hypothetical.

akra• 12 months ago

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.

pseudo0• 12 months ago

Funding 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.

mizzao4• 12 months ago

For 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• 12 months ago

It'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• 12 months ago

Interestingly 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.

NHQ2• 12 months ago

This 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• 12 months ago

Not 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• 12 months ago

https://archive.is/t9HRT

siva7• 12 months ago

Ok people, is this for real like are these detached IC roles or are these articles talking about executive rolles filled by a.i. researchers?

Avicebron• 12 months ago

As far as I know it's only one guy that got this offer, https://mattdeitke.com/ (aside from the others who had the mythical 100 million dollar poaching package).

flappyeagle3• 12 months ago

Source: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+ packages

They are IC roles for the most part

mr902102• 12 months ago

Are you aware of the terms of such offers?

I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially contingent upon achieving certain milestones.

coderatlarge3• 12 months ago

they 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.

statguy• 12 months ago

Any idea roughly how many $100M offers have been made. I initially thought that there were maybe 1-2 such offers and the remaining were maybe around $10-25M. However, judging by this particular case and another report where a $1.5B offer was made to a someone at Thinking Machines, I think that the actual number of such offers is much higher.

Any idea if the Googles/Apples are offering similar retention grants to prevent key employees from leaving?

apwell23• 12 months ago

murati was offered 1B by meta apparently

p1esk8• 12 months ago

Ilya was offered 32B

smokel3• 12 months ago

It'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• 12 months ago

Which 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”.

qgin• 12 months ago

I 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.

smokel3• 12 months ago

I was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a game.

mark_l_watson2• 12 months ago

I saw the ‘forgetting about money, moving on to other challenges’ thing happen about 30 years ago. A childhood friend sold his company for about 300 million (a billion in today’s dollar devaluation?). My friend and his wife continued to live in their same house. The only thing he did was to purchase eight houses for extended family members who didn’t own their own homes, he also got his daughter expensive horse back riding lessons and a horse, and he said he and his wife drank more expensive wine. He did continue to play “The Infinite Game” by staying in the tech industry - it seemed like he loved the game, the money was only to help other people in his life.

saubeidl4• 12 months ago

Capitalism is about to break. The revolution is coming.

fidotron• 12 months ago

Good 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.

MichaelZuo2• 12 months ago

They 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• 12 months ago

Just 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.

HarHarVeryFunny7• 12 months ago

Coming from Meta, I have to wonder if the reason for this isn't more down to Zuck's ego and history. He seems to have somewhat lost interest in FaceBook, and was previously all-in on the Metaverse as the next big thing, which has failed to take off as a concept, and now wants to go all-in on "super-intelligence" (seems to lack ambition - why not "super-duper extra special intelligence"?) with his new vision being smart glasses as the universal AI interface. He can't seem to get past the notion that people want to wear tech on their head and live in augmented reality.

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.

InterviewFrog• 12 months ago

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. The talent pool is extremely small and the companies want the absolute best.

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.

klabb3• 12 months ago

Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. […] It is the same thing in sports as well.

It’s not just uncomfortable but might not be true at all. Sports is practically the opposite type of skills: easy to measure, known rules, enormous amount of repetition. Research is unknown. A researcher that guarantees result is not doing research. (Coincidentally, the increasing rewards in academia for incrementalist result driven work is a big factor in the declining overall quality, imo.)

I think what’s happening is kind of what happened in Wall Street. Those with a few documented successes got disproportionately more business based to a large part on initial conditions and timing.

Not to take away from AI researchers specifically, I’m sure they’re a smart bunch. But I see no reason to think they stand out against other academic fields.

Occam’s razor says it’s panic in the C-suites and they perceive it as an existential race. It’s not important whether it actually is, but rather that’s how they feel. And they have such enormous amount of cash that they’re willing to play many risky bets at the same time. One of them being to hire/poach the hottest names.

TrackerFF5• 12 months ago

Hot fucking take - but if these 100 (or whatever small number is being thrown around these days) elite researchers disappeared overnight, the world would go on and little of it would be noticed. New people in the field would catch up, and things would be up to speed quick enough.

It is not a question of exquisitely rare intellect, but rather the opportunity and funding/resources to prosper.

ofjcihen2• 12 months ago

While I don’t doubt that these people have great experience and skills what they really have that others don’t is connections and the ability to market themselves well.

amelius2• 12 months ago

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, but now with AI researchers.

rfw300• 12 months ago

It has nothing to do with Meta's social media business. Zuckerberg, like many other top tech executives, has concluded AGI/ASI is in striking distance. If he could somehow win the race, he becomes god (or so he thinks, anyway). And from the perspective of a man whose idol is Julius Caesar, what wouldn't you spend for that chance?

AYBABTME• 12 months ago

This seems like it lands in the "most uncharitable" side of the "guess why someone is doing something I don't understand" spectrum. My razors tell me this is usually not the most plausible answer.

firesteelrain4• 12 months ago

When will the bubble pop?

mr902102• 12 months ago

I 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• 12 months ago

Eventually people might consider that just maybe... it's not a bubble...

mattlondon• 12 months ago

When 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.

Enginerrrd• 12 months ago

I think the AI is only as good as the person wrangling it a lot of the time. I think it's easy for really competent people to get an inflated sense of how good the AI is in the same way that a junior engineer is often only as good as the senior leading them along and feeding them small chunks of work. When led with great foresight, careful calibration, and frequent feedback and mentorship, a mediocre junior engineer can be made to look pretty good too. But take away the competent senior and youre left pretty lacking.

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.

impossiblefork3• 12 months ago

Nah. The models are great, but the models can also write a story where characters who in the prompt are clearly specified as never having met are immediately addressing each other by name.

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.

tempodox2• 12 months ago

“AGI” will be whatever state of the art we have at the time the money runs out. The investors will never admit that they built on sand but declare victory by any means necessary, even if it's hollow and meaningless.

Der_Einzige2• 12 months ago

This is my exact take to a tee and also the exact take of Peter Norvig!!!!

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

mhb2• 12 months ago

That's a lot of confidence that this is a bubble rather than an existential race. Maybe you're making bank betting that view?

firesteelrain4• 12 months ago

Not sure what you mean but if I was to invest I would have invested years ago in NVIDIA.

snowstormsun• 12 months ago

2027

mark_l_watson2• 12 months ago

Perhaps when society balances benefits of AI against energy and environmental costs? I have worked through two ‘AI winters’ when funding dried up. This might happen again.

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.

chvid• 12 months ago

When we are seeing down rounds on OpenAI. OpenAI is currently valued at 300B.

abtinf• 12 months ago

HN shows this as google.com, but the link is directly to nytimes.com. Bug?

stevage• 12 months ago

The link is a google.com redirect. You probably have an extension installed that auto-resolves such redirects.

_Algernon_• 12 months ago

It's a redirect.

tomhow3• 12 months ago

We updated the link to its redirect URL.

tomhow3• 12 months ago

At $250M, top AI salaries dwarf the Manhattan Project and the Space Race - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765193 - Aug 2025 (66 comments)

jokoon• 12 months ago

Meanwhile I'm not sure that training myself to do ai would increase my odds of getting a job

betaby• 12 months ago

Probably not. Definitely not if live outside of the USA.

checker659• 12 months ago

Without access to hardware, you don't do much.

ivape2• 12 months ago

At 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• 12 months ago

aww, they can't be sleazy CEO types who "make number go up" for 2-3 years and leave with a golden parachute?

ivape2• 12 months ago

No, it’s a 24-year old:

https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lur...

dmurray• 12 months ago

What really, private industry pays top performing individuals more than the government ever did?

normie3000• 12 months ago

How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 12 months ago

Get a PhD in a related field like math or computer science.

seanbarry• 12 months ago

And have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge of AI research.

coderatlarge3• 12 months ago

actually applied math or statistics.

kergonath• 12 months ago

That is unfortunately far from enough. The majority end up doing ok but nowhere near this much money.

lossolo• 12 months ago

There 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• 12 months ago

These $100mm+ hires are centering divs in flex boxes on the first try. They are simply not like you and me.

exasperaited7• 12 months ago

Hahaha well you got me there. They are earning it.

ramraj07• 12 months ago

These are not just people with credentials, but are literally some of the smartest people on earth. Us normal people cannot and should not think we were just a few decisions away from being there.

BSOhealth• 12 months ago

These 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.

AIPedant3• 12 months ago

A 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.

brandall104• 12 months ago

It'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.

ignoramous2• 12 months ago

Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these global sporting institutions.

How much revenue does Google make in a day? £700m+.

ojbyrne• 12 months ago

My understanding is that the bulk of revenue comes from television contracts. There has been speculation that that could easily shrink in the future if the charges become more granular and non-sports watching people stop subsidizing the sports watching people. That seems analogous to AI money.

positron26• 12 months ago

OOf. Trying awfully hard to have a bad day there eh?

magic_man• 12 months ago

Top athletes they have stats to measure. I guess for these researchers I guess there are papers? How do you know who did what with multiple authors? How do you figure out who is Jordan vs Steve Kerr?

thefaux2• 12 months ago

Yeah, who knew that Kerr would have the more successful overall career in basketball?

stocksinsmocks• 12 months ago

It’s just a matter of taste, but I am pleased to see publicity on people with compensation packages that greatly exceed actors and athletes. It’s about time the nerds got some recognition. My hope is that researchers get the level of celebrity that they deserve and inspire young people to put their minds to building great things.

layer82• 12 months ago

The money these millions are coming from is already based on nerds having gotten incredibly rich (i.e. big tech). The recognition is arguably yet to follow.

dbacar• 12 months ago

how do you know they are nerds?

gherkinnn2• 12 months ago

Sounds vindictive. And yet. According to Forbes, the top 8 richest people have a tech background, most of whom are "nerdy" by some definition.

moomin• 12 months ago

It’s closer to actors and athletes than we’d all hope, in that most people get a pittance or are out of work while a select few make figures that hit newspapers.

yreg• 12 months ago

Intel made an ad series based on a similar idea in ~2010.

“Our Rock Stars Aren't Like Your Rock Stars”

https://youtu.be/7l_oTgKMi-s

godelski12• 12 months ago

I think I'm mostly with you but it also depends how it exactly plays out.

Like I definitely think it is better for society if the economic forces are incentivizing pursuit of knowledge more than pursuit of pure entertainment[0]. But I think we also need to be a bit careful here. You need some celebrities to be the embodiment of an idea but the distribution can be too sharp and undermine, what I think we both agree on is, the goal.

Yeah, I think, on average, a $100M researcher is generating more net good for a society (and world) than a $100M sports player or actor. Maybe not in every instance, but I feel pretty confident about this on average. But at the same time, do we get more with one $100M researcher or 100 $1M researchers? It's important to recognize that we're talking about such large sums of money that at any of these levels people would be living in extreme luxury. Even in SV the per capita income is <$150k/yr, while the median income is medium income is like half that. You'd be easily in the top 1%. (The top 10% for San Jose is $275k/yr)

I think we also need to be a bit careful in recognizing how motivation can misalign incentives and goals. Is the money encouraging more to do research and push humanity's knowledge forward? Or is the money now just another means for people that just want money to exploit, who have no interest in advancing humanity's knowledge? Obviously it is a lot more complicated and both are happening but I think it is worth recognizing that if things shift towards the latter than they actually make it harder to achieve the original goals.

So on paper, I'm 100% with you. But I'm not exactly sure the paper is matching reality.

[0] To be clear, I don't think entertainment has no value. It has a lot and it plays a critical role in society.

xorcist4• 12 months ago

Not really the same, is it? Actors are hired to act. Athletes get paid to improve the sport. It's not like nerds are poached to do academic research or nerd out at their hearts desire. This is a business transaction that Zuck intends to make money from.

Locking up more of the world's information behind their login wall, or increase their ad sales slightly is not enough to make that kind of money. We can only speculate, of course, but at the same time I think the general idea is pretty clear: AI will soon have a lot of power, and control over that power is thought to be valuable.

The bit about "building great things" certainly rings true. Just not in the same way artists or scientists do.

vitaflo• 12 months ago

Nerds run the entire world how much recognition do they need?!

TrackerFF5• 12 months ago

Frontier AI that scales – these people all have extensive experience with developing systems that operate with hundreds of millions of users.

Don’t get me wrong, they are smart people - but so are thousands of other researchers you find in academia etc. - difference here is scale of the operation.

torginus• 12 months ago

Yeah, I guess if you have a datacenter that costs $100B, even hiring a humble CUDA assembly wizard that can optimize your code to run 10% faster is worth $10B to the company.

bbminner3• 12 months ago

Hm, I thought that these salaries were offered to actual "giants" like Jeff Dean or someone extremely knowledgeable in the specifics of how the "business side" of AI might look like (CEOs, etc). Can someone clarify what is so special about this specific person? He is not a "top tier athlete" - I looked at his academic profile and it does not seem impressive to me by any measure. He'd make an alright (not even particularly great) assistant professor in a second tier university - which is impressive, but is by no means unique enough to explain this compensation.

bbminner3• 12 months ago

A PhD dropout with an alright (passable) academic record, who worked in a 1.5-tier lab on a fairly pedestrian project (multimodal llms and agents, sure), and started a startup.. Reallyttrying to not sound bitter, good for him, I guess, but does it indicate that there's something really fucked up with how talent is being acquired?

sbinnee• 12 months ago

I think the key was multimodality. Meta made a big move in combining texts, audio, images. I remember imagebind was pretty cool. Allen AI has published some notable models, and Matt seems to have expertise in multimodal models. Molmo looks really cool.

cm2187• 12 months ago

What I don't understand in this AI race is that the #2 or #3 is not years behind #1, I understand it is months behind at worst. Does that headstart really matter to justify those crazy comps? Will takes years for large corporations to integrate those things. Also takes years for the general public to change their habits. And if the .com era taught us anything, it is that none of the ultimate winners were the first to market.

storus• 12 months ago

LLaMA 4 is barely better than LLaMA 3.3 so a year of development didn't bring any worthy gains for Meta, and execs are likely panicking in order not to slip further given what even a resource-constrained DeepSeek did to them.

peterlk• 12 months ago

There is a group of wealthy individuals who have bought in to the idea that the singularity (AIs improving themselves faster than humans can) is months away. Whoever gets there first will get compound growth first, and no one will be able to catch up.

If you do not believe this narrative, then your .com era comment is a pretty good analysis.

godelski12• 12 months ago

What I don't understand is with such small of a gap why this isn't a huge boon for research.

While there's a lot of money going towards research, there's less than there was years ago. There's been a shift towards engineering research and ML Engineer hiring. Fewer positions for lower level research than there were just a few years ago. I'm not saying don't do the higher level research, just that it seems weird to not do the lower level when the gap is so small.

I really suspect that the winner is going to be the one that isn't putting speed above all else. Like you said, first to market isn't everything. But if first to market is all the matters then you're also more likely to just be responding to noise in the system. The noisy signal of figuring out what that market is in the first place. It's really easy to get off track with that and lose sight of the actual directions you need to pursue.

IshKebab• 12 months ago

Yeah this makes zero sense. Also unlike a pop star or even a footballer who are at least reasonably reliable, AI research is like 95% luck. It's very unlikely that any AI researcher that has had a big breakthrough will have a second one.

Remember capsule networks?

perks_12• 12 months ago

I can print jersey with Neymars name on it and drive revenue. i can't do that with some ai researcher. they have to actually deliver and i don't see how a person with $100M net-worth will do anything other than coast.

ulfw• 12 months ago

F1 or soccer salaries are high because these are MARKETABLE people. The people themselves are a marketable brand.

They're not high because of performance/results alone.

user____name• 12 months ago

Rational inside a deeply olligopolistic and speculative market.

unyttigfjelltol• 12 months ago

I 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_one6• 12 months 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.

ignoramous2• 12 months 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_crab2• 12 months ago

There’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.

mizzao4• 12 months ago

It's interesting the kind of Hail Mary pass they are throwing here when they already have Yann LeCun...

TheAceOfHearts• 12 months ago

Wonder 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?

walterbell2• 12 months ago

Imagine.. had all the keys needed

.. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.

jodrellblank4• 12 months 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.

baobabKoodaa2• 12 months ago

I 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.

xorcist4• 12 months ago

What 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.

elbear2• 12 months ago

Seems like their only motivation is their desire to succeed, glory, etc.

lionkor2• 12 months ago

Im sure in the US you can never have enough money

satrxrer• 12 months ago

I think Dario Amodei just said this much on a podcast and that is why he isn't worried.

That they are building a team with a selection bias for this too.

JonChesterfield2• 12 months ago

Plenty of people are motivated by the work, not the money.

Given more money they just subcontract out increasing fractions of the overhead of life in order to do more of the work.

dmezzetti• 12 months ago

As 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• 12 months ago

There 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.

wiseowise7• 12 months ago

Anyone can be worth anything, as long as there’s someone willing to pay.

soulofmischief• 12 months ago

Lol. 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.

thefaux2• 12 months ago

Honestly, 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• 12 months ago

Is 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?

turnsout7• 12 months ago

I'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."

master_crab2• 12 months ago

This is one of those comments that is enjoyably cynical…and conceivably accurate.

layer82• 12 months ago

If it were possible to guess, enough people would do it to drive the price to down to reasonable levels. Unless maybe you believe you are in the top 100 or so in the world able to do what it takes.

akomtu• 12 months ago

You need to be a someone who has a high chance of creating an AI-centric company.

robbomacrae• 12 months ago

Alright 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.

tempodox2• 12 months ago

To me it's just fascinating to see how much further you can pump up this hype bubble. My pop corn reserves need a refill.

dekhn2• 12 months ago

When 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.

noobermin• 12 months ago

When the crash hits, it will hit hard.

pizzafeelsright• 12 months ago

These big winners could retire their entire social circle.

ofjcihen2• 12 months ago

People 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• 12 months ago

Of 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• 12 months ago

This 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• 12 months ago

They're being paid to not do their own startup and become competition.

amelius2• 12 months ago

Not sure if that's really smart.

With $250M they can easily buy their own competitive AI compute rig ...

airspresso• 12 months ago

Keep 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.

apparent8• 12 months ago

This 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.

mi_lk• 12 months 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

apparent8• 12 months ago

I 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.

esafak• 12 months ago

It's multivariate; better for what? None of them are best across the board.

I think what we're seeing here is superstar economics, where the market believes the top players are disproportionately more valuable than average. Typically this is bad, because it leads to low median compensation but in this rare case it is working out.

toddmorey• 12 months ago

I don’t see a winner takes all moat forming. If anything, the model providers are almost hot-swappable. And it seems the lifespan for being the best SOTA model is now measured in weeks.

apparent8• 12 months ago

It's true they are currently quite interchangeable these days. But the point is that if one can pull far enough ahead, it will get a much bigger share of the market.

jjmarr3• 12 months ago

The actual OpenRouter data says otherwise.[1] Right now, Google leads with only 28.4% marketshare. Anthropic (24.7%), Deepseek (15.4%), and Qwen (10.8%) are the runners-up.

If this were winner-take-all market with low switching costs, we'd be seeing instant majority market domination whenever a new SOTA model comes out every few weeks. But this isn't happening in practice, even though it's much easier to switch models on OpenRouter than many other inference providers.

I get the perception of "winner-take-all" is why the salaries are shooting up, but it's at-odds with the reality.

[1] https://openrouter.ai/rankings

nextworddev3• 12 months ago

Openrouter data is skewed toward 1) startups, 2) cost sensitive workloads, and generally not useful as a gauge of enterprise adoption

chychiu• 12 months ago

Actually that is decent data and reflective of current SOTA in terms of cost performance tradeoff

Mistletoe2• 12 months ago

I and most normal people can’t even tell the difference between models. This is less like an arms race and more like an ugly baby contest.

TrackerFF5• 12 months ago

I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario. If that is to happen, I think the following assumptions must hold:

1) The winner immediately becomes a monopoly

2) All investments are directed from competitors, to the winner

3) Research on AGI/ASI ceases

I don't see how any of these would be viable. Right now there's an incremental model arms race, with no companies holding a secret sauce so powerful that they're miles above the rest.

I think it will continue like it does today. Some company will break through with some sort of AGI model, and the competitors will follow. Then open source models will be released. Same with ASI.

The things that will be important and guarded are: data and compute.

apparent8• 12 months ago

Yeah, this is why I said "(most)". But regardless, I think it's pretty uncontroversial that not all companies currently pursuing AI will ultimately succeed. Some will give up because they aren't in the top few contenders, who will be the only ones that survive in the long run.

So maybe the issue is more about staying in the top N, and being willing to pay tons to make sure that happens.

nsriv• 12 months ago

I agree with you, and think we are in the heady days where moat building hasn't quite begun. Regarding 1) and 3), most models have API access to facilitate quick switching and agentic AI middleware reaps the benefits of new models being better at some specific use-case than a competitor. In the not-so-distant future, I can see the walls coming up, with some version of white-listed user-agent access only. At the moment, model improvement hype and priority access are the product, but at some point capability and general access will be the product.

We are already seeing diminishing returns from compute and training costs going up, but as more and more AI is used in the wild and pollutes training data, having validated data becomes the moat.

groestl2• 12 months ago

Right now there's an incremental model arms race

Yes, but just like in an actual arms race, we don't know if this can evolve in a winner takes all scenario very quickly and literally.

specialist• 12 months ago

I don't think AI will be a winner-take-all scenario.

AI? Do you mean LLMs, GPTs, both, or other?

Why won't AI follow the technology life cycle?

It'll always be stuck in the R&D phase, never reach maturity?

It's on a different life cycle?

Once AI matures, something prevents consolidation? (eg every nation protects its champions)

andrewrn• 12 months ago

I agree with this comment.

Maybe it's just me but I haven't been model-hopping one bit. For my daily chatbot usage, I just don't feel inclined to model-hop so much to squeeze out some tiny improvement. All the models are way beyond "good enough" at this point, so I just continue using ChatGPT and switching back and forth from o3 and 4o. I would love to hear if others are different.

Maybe others are doing some hyper-advanced stuff where the edging out makes a difference, but I just don't buy it.

A good example is search engines. Google is a pseudo-monopoly because google search gives obviously better results than bing or duckduckgo. In my experience this just isn't the case for LLM's. Its more nuanced than better or worse. LLM's are more like car models where everyone makes a personal choice on which they like the best.

AbstractH24• 12 months ago

The problem is models are decaying at incredible speed and being the leader today has limited guarantee you’ll be it tomorrow.

OpenAI has a limited protective moat because ChatGPT is synonymous with generative AI at the moment, but that isn’t any more baked in than MySpace (certainly not in the league of Twitter or Facebook).

adammarples• 12 months ago

Who the heck is making profit?

beAbU• 12 months ago

If the next best model is 0.5x as expensive, then many might opt for that in use cases where the results are already good enough.

At work we are optimising cost by switching in different models for different agents based on use case, and where testing has demonstrated a particular model's output is sufficient.

stefan_• 12 months ago

That is exactly how all of this has played out so far (beep, not at fucking all!)

You are not one random hyperparameter away from the SciFi singularity. You are making iterative improvements and throwing more compute at the problem, as are all your competitors, all of which are to some degree utterly exchangeable.

polski-g• 12 months ago

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.

Well only if the price is the same. Otherwise people will value price over quality, or quality over price. Like they do for literally every other product they select...

fooker2• 12 months ago

You’re right.

It would be unfortunate if something like Grok takes the cake here.

apparent8• 12 months ago

Why?

redox99• 12 months ago

Most likely won't be a winner-take-all, but something like it is right now, a never ending treadmill where the same 3 or 4 players release a SOTA model every year or so.

croes2• 12 months ago

There is LLM 1.5x as good as the next best.

I tried multiple and they all fail and some point so I let another LLM take over.

As soon it’s not some boilerplate thing it becomes harder to get the correct result

UmGuys3• 12 months ago

I don't think so. It's just a bubble. There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots. If someone were to achieve AGI, maybe they win, but it's unlikely to exist. Or if it does, we can't define it.

nopinsight3• 12 months ago

What would you say if the IMO Gold Medal models from DeepMind and OpenAI turn out to be generalizable to other domains including those with hard-to-verify reward signals?

Hint: Researchers from both companies said publicly they employ generalized reasoning techniques in these IMO models.

cesarb3• 12 months ago

There's no AI, we have fancy chatbots.

"Fancy chatbots" is a classic AI use case. ELIZA is a well-known example of early AI software.

bgwalter• 12 months ago

It 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• 12 months ago

One 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/

[2] https://allenai.org/blog/molmo

naveen992• 12 months ago

Molmo caught my eye also a while ago.

andyjensen• 12 months ago

Same except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree

tantalor• 12 months ago

could be worth...

Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?

aleph_minus_one6• 12 months ago

What's the likelihood of that?

Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)

gsf_emergency_2• 12 months ago

It's strange that Zuck didn't just buy options on that guy? (Or did he? Would love to see the terms.)

Zuck's advantage over Sir Isaac (Newton) is that the market for top AI researchers is much more volatile than in South Sea tradeables pre-bubble burst?

Either that or 250M is cheap for cognitive behavior therapy

Hamuko• 12 months ago

In this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.

Infinity315• 12 months ago

It might make more sense to think of in terms of expected value. Whilst the probability may be low, the payoff is probably many times the $250M if their startup becomes successful.

cweld510• 12 months ago

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

exasperaited7• 12 months ago

This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.

But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.

This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.

mensetmanusman2• 12 months ago

Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.

tracerbulletx• 12 months ago

Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.

bbor2• 12 months ago

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~=2.5 at most!

I hope for all of our sake's that you're right. I feel confident that you're not :(

bloodyplonker22• 12 months ago

I agree on all points. However, if he already had several millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

ceejayoz3• 12 months ago

I’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.

overfeed2• 12 months ago

Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

Meta will have more AI-compute than he ever hoped to get at his - and most other - startups.

Rover222• 12 months ago

This is such a weird sentiment to me, comparing taking one of the highest paying corporate jobs in the history of humanity to bowing down to some dictator.

tom_m• 12 months ago

[flagged]

trhway• 12 months ago

Various BigCo-s have been reporting good results recently and highlighted significant AI role in that. That may be a BS of course, yet even if it is half-true we're talking about tens/hundreds of billions of revenues. With 10x multiple it supports a trillion like generic valuation of AI in business right now.

tomhow3• 12 months ago

Please don't post shallow dismissals... - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's fine to think that we're in a bubble and to post a comment explaining your thoughts about it. But a comment like this is a low-effort, drive-by shoot-down of a comment that took at least a bit of thought and effort, and that's exactly what we don't want on HN.

mizzao4• 12 months ago

It's also possible, based on what happens to those who win the lottery, that his life could become a lot harder. It's not great to have the fact that you're making $2M a week plastered all over the Internet.

zurfer• 12 months ago

He probably heard the memes, didn't really want to work for Meta and said a "ridiculous" high number and Meta was like: we can do that.

atleastoptimal5• 12 months ago

So 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.

catmanjan2• 12 months ago

How can anyone still believe the AGI scam

atleastoptimal5• 12 months ago

If you think the possibility of AGI within 7-10 years is a scam then you aren't paying attention to trends.

jimmy2times2• 12 months ago

I can't believe this is so unpopular here. Maybe it's the tone, but come on, how do people rationally extrapolate from LLMs or even large multimodal generative models to "general intelligence"? Sure, they might do a better job than the average person on a range of tasks, but they're always prone to funny failures pretty much by design (train vs test distribution mismatch). They might combine data in interesting ways you hadn't thought of; that doesn't mean you can actually rely on them in the way you do on a truly intelligent human.

genedan• 12 months ago

My hope is that we can at least get a Civ game with a competent AI...

omnee• 12 months ago

Zuck 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.

exasperaited7• 12 months ago

And 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• 12 months ago

Am 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?

lionkor2• 12 months ago

How: Meta has the money because they presumably have infinite margins.

Why: Its a bubble.

TrackerFF5• 12 months ago

Why: 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• 12 months ago

At 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• 12 months ago

cant wait for him to come out with his own energy drink

nrmitchi• 12 months ago

My 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)

mizzao4• 12 months ago

Even 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.

mensetmanusman2• 12 months ago

Based 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• 12 months ago

If Linus Torvalds got paid based on his impact on the world he might just be the world's richest man

mmmBacon• 12 months ago

If 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• 12 months ago

Just 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• 12 months ago

I 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• 12 months ago

All 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.

wiseowise7• 12 months ago

Why not put people in gulag? Ultimate democratization means. A plate of chow for everyone.

ghushn3• 12 months ago

I 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.

joshdavham2• 12 months ago

This 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• 12 months ago

Eh, 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• 12 months ago

You'll never accumulate society warping amounts of money with that attitude.

freejazz• 12 months ago

Jeez!

udev4096• 12 months ago

A fellow sell-out. Welcome. Those are in abundance, having no honor and ethics

recipe19• 12 months ago

These 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.

yunohn• 12 months ago

Most sources confirmed that yearly effective pay would be 100M level, unlike the normal tech breakdown.

OpenAI doesn’t do the usual equity for employees, they famously do profit sharing.

xandrius2• 12 months ago

I'd expect a few millions of annual pay, anyone could retire on that. Whether someone wants to, it's different but having anything beyond $1M available is definitely sufficient, especially if you're sub-40.

joshdavham2• 12 months ago

I'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• 12 months ago

What 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• 12 months ago

But did they remember to mention pre-planned vacation dates? Maybe not so smart after all.

j7ake• 12 months ago

If these people are making that much, I wonder what is the compensation for people like LeCunn.

seydor• 12 months ago

this 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• 12 months ago

Money 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• 12 months ago

I 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.

ornornor• 12 months ago

Or you can tell them that zuck is making the world way worse overall and you don’t want to enable that, regardless.

matco11• 12 months ago

I 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.

saagarjha9• 12 months ago

You can have an exciting, high impact career without being paid hundreds of millions of dollars.

nobodywillobsrv• 12 months ago

What 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• 12 months ago

I 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• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

Presumably 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.

Voultapher5• 12 months ago

Slightly 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.

tonyhart73• 12 months ago

Yeah 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

Voultapher5• 12 months ago

I 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.

mupuff1234• 12 months ago

Basically an anti trust loophole - why but a company and face regulations when you can buy the people?

JCM9• 12 months ago

GenAI Bubble.

IAmGraydon• 12 months ago

The 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• 12 months ago

my sibling is an AI researcher at Apple. He still flies Frontier airlines.

missedthecue• 12 months ago

How 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.

JonChesterfield2• 12 months ago

Public 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• 12 months ago

We should take all the money away from Petey T and the treason bunch, then.

aagha• 11 months ago

It'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.

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

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