> A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work.
Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
vinni2 · 2h ago
> Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention.
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
fxtentacle · 4h ago
A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
4gotunameagain · 2h ago
The fact does not contradict economic analyses, it points out what a great shift there has been.
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
eviks · 2h ago
> for the perceived common greater good
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
bgwalter · 4h ago
The author of the article appears to think that Oppenheimer's intellectual contributions were superior to those of the "AI" implementers.
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
tzury · 5h 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.
raphinou · 5h 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
tossandthrow · 4h 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 · 4h 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.
anon191928 · 4h ago
it's because they printed $trillions so amount of money is a lot in the system. I mean debt
lelanthran · 3h 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.
em500 · 4h 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.
smokel · 5h ago
Or it might go up.
tokioyoyo · 4h ago
Where would put their money into though? It’s such a weird economy, especially with the expected decrease in younger population.
demiters · 4h 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.
laardaninst · 2h 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.
saubeidl · 3h ago
European defense stocks seem like a pretty good bet right now.
Hikikomori · 4h 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.
simianwords · 4h 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.
saubeidl · 4h 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.
jatora · 4h 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.
ehnto · 4h 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.
saubeidl · 4h ago
Maybe it's the legacy capitalists that are really something else?
physicsguy · 5h ago
Big difference was that at that time people were doing things both for the race itself but also because ideologically they believed in the mission.
im_down_w_otp · 5h ago
I think people are ideologically aligned with the mission today. It's just that grifting off yet-another-hype-cycle is the mission.
BrenBarn · 4h 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.
roenxi · 4h ago
Those two examples are government-run projects and in the case of the Manhattan project were part of a scheme with the main purpose of murdering people at a mass scale. The question there was more how much would we have had to pay those people not to do what they did.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.
dave333 · 3h 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.
pseudo0 · 3h 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.
teekert · 3h 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.
meekaaku · 4h 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.
ehnto · 3h 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.
meekaaku · 2h ago
ok maybe bat an eyelid,
but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.
quonn · 2h 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?
mutatio · 3h 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.
mhh__ · 4h ago
In some ways it's a stupid comparison because back then people didn't take money that seriously because the state still knew how to hire serious talent and reward them with status instead.
ed_elliott_asc · 5h 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.
midnightclubbed · 4h 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.
theshackleford · 4h 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.
anon191928 · 3h ago
how is he snake oil s. since that time, he with his several teams, actually made electric cars a market wide reality, cheap orbit rockets and with starlink internet almost everywhere possible on earth? snake oil would be over without actually changing the history.
makeitdouble · 4h 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.
BrenBarn · 4h ago
> At the same time, asking them to solve social problems with money and technology and dubious morality doesn't look like the way forward either.
Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money and just spread it around.
ed_elliott_asc · 3h 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.
but it's not the same reading the lyrics, you really need to hear his voice
andrewstuart · 4h ago
It’s all pretty normal.
I’m earning up near $250 million a year, aren’t you? If not maybe time for a job jump.
NHQ · 3h 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.
khazhoux · 4h 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.
monero-xmr · 4h 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
lawik · 4h 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.
hollerith · 4h 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.
ehnto · 3h 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?
kgwgk · 4h 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.
tossandthrow · 4h 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.
simianwords · 4h ago
you just described how it is the same thing
tossandthrow · 4h ago
Yeah, I forgot a "not" leading to...
benreesman · 4h 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.
ggm · 4h 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_Einzige · 4h 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.
ggm · 4h ago
One of my favourite Marx reminiscences is how his colleagues tried to buy him some IPR to provide for his wellbeing in later life: patent rights. Literally rent seeking on innovation. I'm not sure if it's in Emile Burns biography.
What I did or didn't read is alas occluded from you. The Masereel illustrated woodcuts on a recent edition of the manifesto are wonderful.
anabab · 3h ago
wait-wait-wait. So a SWE investing in VT is just a well-skilled proletarian owning a share of the global means of production? is this communism already?
simianwords · 4h 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.
Der_Einzige · 4h ago
The kneejerk downvotes you and the parent are getting are proof that you are correct. Thank you for triggering the downvoters.
ehnto · 3h ago
That is proof of nothing, please be more grounded in your commentary.
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work. Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
For me the Meta storm of billions in hiring was enough to start selling any tech giant related stock.
It is about to crash, harder than ever.
The issue with high salaries is that there is a latent assumption that these people provide the multiples in additional value. That they are so smarter than everyone else.
This is simply not true, and will lead to a competitive disadvantage.
When OpenAI was making waves the first time, then Google launched their neutered incapable competitor, I thought it is “over” for Google because why would anyone use search anymore (apart from the 1% of use cases where it gives better results faster), and clearly they are incapable of building good new products anymore…
and now they are there with the best LLMs and they are at the top of the pack again.
Billions of dollars in the bank, great developers, good connections to politicians and institutions mean that you are hard to replace even if you fumble it a couple of times.
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.
We're sailing uncharted waters, all bets are off.
EUR:USD has been rising for a reason.
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.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.
Edit oops, knowledge was outdated, it’s about 270.000.
These AI researchers will probably have far more impact on society (good or bad I dont know) than the athletes, and the people who pay them (ie zuck et al) certainly thinks its worth paying them this much because they provide value.
but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.
Are there 250 million AI specialists and the ones hired by Meta still come out on top?
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.
But the promises turned into stock boosting lies; the environmental good into vote buying for climate change deniers, and space exploration into low earth cell-towers.
Those years were a long time ago for me. I’ve been arguing musk is a snake oil salesman since at least 2014. I lost friends over it at the time, people who were very heavily invested into musk, both financially and for some reason, emotionally.
Very aptly, the Manhattan Project or Space Race weren't aimed at the improvement of mankind per se. Motivation was a lot more specific and down to earth.
Well, no, the way forward is to just take away all that money and just spread it around.
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
I’m earning up near $250 million a year, aren’t you? If not maybe time for a job jump.
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
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.
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.
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?
A 1b $ anonymous software engineer is likely leading to 5000 more revenue than a 200k talented Ai engineer.
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.
Because if it's not funding the revolution (peaceful or otherwise) why exactly would a leftist applaud these salaries?
Marx hated the bourgeoisie (business owners, including petite-bourgeoisie AKA small business owners) and loved the proletariat - including the extremely skilled or well paid proletarians.
Marx also hated the lumpen-proletariet - AKA prostitutes, homeless, etc.
What I did or didn't read is alas occluded from you. The Masereel illustrated woodcuts on a recent edition of the manifesto are wonderful.
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.