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.
smokel · 1h 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 · 1h 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”.
mark_l_watson · 52m 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.
smokel · 1h ago
I was going for irony, not analogy. Unfortunately, even though some incompetent fools think it is, life is not a game.
qgin · 1h 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.
tough · 1h ago
if we get AGI and a post-scarcity age what makes these people think they -reaching- AGI will make them kings.
seems like governments will have a thing to say about who's able to run that AGI or not.
GPU's run on datacenters which exist in countries
ElevenLathe · 1h ago
Yes but countries are run by governments, which are composed of people, who can be bribed. If you believe that AI will make you the richest person in human history, you presumably can see that the problem of government can be solved with enough money.
mhb · 51m ago
Presumably they think that, whatever chance they have of becoming kings if they get there first is more than the chance if someone else does. In we get AGI, we is doing all the work.
saubeidl · 49m ago
Capitalism is about to break. The revolution is coming.
No comments yet
BSOhealth · 59m 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.
AIPedant · 51m 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.
jokoon · 1h ago
Meanwhile I'm not sure that training myself to do ai would increase my odds of getting a job
normie3000 · 1h ago
How can I get one of these jobs? I am currently an OK web dev.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF · 57m ago
Get a PhD in a related field like math or computer science.
seanbarry · 50m ago
And have spent the last 15 years working on the cutting edge of AI research.
coderatlarge · 49m ago
actually applied math or statistics.
fidotron · 1h 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.
InterviewFrog · 52m 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.
MichaelZuo · 1h 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?
HarHarVeryFunny · 19m 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 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.
lores · 44m 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.
HarHarVeryFunny · 14m ago
Yeah, pretty much agree.
The only case where this may have made sense - but more for an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the transformer architecture, had made a number of architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus had a track record of being able to wring performance out of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of money.
TheAceOfHearts · 46m 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?
firesteelrain · 1h ago
When will the bubble pop?
mattlondon · 1h 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 · 49m 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.
mark_l_watson · 42m 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.
mr90210 · 1h 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 · 1h ago
Eventually people might consider that just maybe... it's not a bubble...
firesteelrain · 1h ago
I just don’t think the industry is moatless. Where there is a moat in my opinion is airgap because few are pursuing this and not everyone wants their data in the Cloud.
DonsDiscountGas · 35m ago
2000 was a bubble, and yet the internet continued to eat the world after it popped. I expect we'll see something similar
snowstormsun · 48m ago
2027
mhb · 49m 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?
siva7 · 1h 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 · 1h 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).
flappyeagle · 1h ago
Source: I know people who have both accepted and declined 100M+ packages
They are IC roles for the most part
coderatlarge · 46m 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.
mr90210 · 1h 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.
apwell23 · 1h ago
murati was offered 1B by meta apparently
ivape · 1h 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 · 1h ago
aww, they can't be sleazy CEO types who "make number go up" for 2-3 years and leave with a golden parachute?
I assume you are going for “there are no more useful resources to acquire so those with all the resources overpay just to feel like they own those last few they don’t yet own”.
seems like governments will have a thing to say about who's able to run that AGI or not.
GPU's run on datacenters which exist in countries
No comments yet
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.
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.
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.
Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?
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.
The only case where this may have made sense - but more for an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the transformer architecture, had made a number of architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus had a track record of being able to wring performance out of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of money.
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?
Some people are rightly pointing out that for quite a lot of things right now we probably already have AGI to a certain extent. Your average AI is way better than the average schmuck on the street in basically anything you can think of - maths, programming, writing poetry, world languages, music theory. Sure there are outliers where AI is not as good as a skilled practitioner in foo, but I think the AGI bar is about being "about as good as the average human" and not showing complete supremacy in every niche. So far the world has been disrupted sure, but not ended.
ASI of course is the next thing, but that's different.
I've gotten some great results out of LLM's, but thats often because the prompt was well crafted, and numerous iterations were performed based on my expertise.
You couldn't get that out of the LLM without that person most of the time.
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.
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.
They are IC roles for the most part
I suppose those $100M are spread across years and potentially contingent upon achieving certain milestones.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/01/business/meta-pays-250m-to-lur...