I feel like there's a lot of half-truths in the article and some of the comments here.
1. The $100M is a huge number. Maybe there was 1 person, working on large-scale training or finetuning, who had an offer like this, which surely was a high offer even in base (like let's say $1M+), and had a lot of stock and bonus clauses, which over 4+ years could have worked out to a big number. But I don't believe that the average SWE or DE ("staffer") working on the OpenAI ChatGPT UI Javascript would get this offer..
2. One of the comments here says "[Zuck] has mediocre talent". I worked at Facebook ~10 years ago, it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure it's still an impressive set of people overall.
Disclaimer: I don't work in the LLM space, not even in the US tech space anymore.
Comments aimed at Zuck’s talent always seem jealous to me. An argument can be made that he lacks a good moral compass using specific public examples but I haven’t seen any similar evidence to argue a lack of talent.
I also know many folks who’ve worked at Meta. Almost all of them are talented despite many working there regretfully.
Is it just me, or does Mr. Wang give grifter/charleton vibes. Like I get you don't hand 14bb and positions like this to 28 year olds for nothing. He seems like a really good salesperson mostly, which sometimes give me pause. However, I'm sure Meta needs excellent sales people... for 14bb though? Like did Meta really need labeling/training infra? Idk, the whole deal is weird to me.
It's incredible to me that talent != moral values is this widespread. I know this was pre-Cambridge Analytica but the writing was on the wall, and we see the same with each new tech wave.
Whenever I ask such people, they talk about the incredible perks, stock options, challenges. They do say they are overburdened though.
These are people who would be rich anyway, and could work anywhere, doing much more good.
> "[Zuck] has mediocre talent"I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.
I know Zuck personally and this is one of the big understandings to do with him. If you adjust his selector switch (just below the 3rd rib-like component on the pseudo thorax) to "science and engineering", you'll find he's the most brilliant guy ever, like Data from Star Trek! But this mode consumes some CPU cycles normally spent on hu-man interactions so he can come off as awkward.
A year or two back we switched it to "JW" (Jack Welch) and a sticky-fingered unix programmer spilled diet mountain dew all over the switch, it's been stuck there ever sense, hence here we are, hence the reputation for no-talent. It's there we just have to figure out how to get that switch jarred loose.
Re: Mark. I agree. It surprised me to no end that he knew the staffing and open headcount of every team. I was a manager for most of my tenure, but his interactions with Lars, Chris and others were always insightful enlightening.
3B people use the products daily for an hour on average. FB products are the primary way these people communicate with their friends & families online.
Whether this is true or not, this is a clever move to publicize. Anyone being poached by Meta now from OpenAI will feel like asking for 100m bonuses and will possibly feel underappreciated with only a 20 or 50 million signing bonus.
Isn't pretty much everyone working at OpenAI already clearly motivated by money over principle? OpenAI had a very public departure from being for-good to being for-money last year...
I think money and the promise of resources will convince enough qualified people to join Meta, but I guess it doesn't help their recruiting efforts that Zuck seems to have the most dystopian and anti-human AGI vision of all the company heads.
Of course we have good reasons to be cynical about Sam Altman or Anthropic's Dario Amodei, but at least their public statements and blog posts pretend to envision a positive future where humanity is empowered. They might bring about ruinous disruption that humanity won't recover from while trying to do that, but at least they claim to care.
What is Zuckerberg's vision? AI generated friends for which there is a "demand" (because their social networks pivoted away from connecting humans) and genAI advertising to more easily hack people's reward centers.
> And OpenAi probably had to renegotiate with those with a $100m offer so their costs went up.
That sounds like the actual move here. Exploding your competitors cost structure because you're said to pay insane amounts of money for people willing to change...
On the other hand: People talk. If Meta will not pay that money that talk would probably go around...
Following this logic if Meta had been offering this money and stop doing so going forward, this article is pretty good cover for reigning those costs in (if they wanted to).
This is software developing a transfer market like footballers, isn't it? We've still got a long way to catch up with Ronaldo.
In both cases this is driven by "tournament wages": you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers, because the size of your team is limited and the important metric is beating the other team.
It's also interesting to contrast this with the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric. It sounds like the compensation curve is going to get steeper and steeper.
The curve is getting steeper, yes. That's not a contrast to the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric.
Steeper means: higher at the top. Lower on the bottom.
Right now, AI can do the job of the bottom large percentage of programmers better than those programmers. Look up how a disruptive S-curve works. At the end, we may be left with one programmer overseeing an AI "improving" itself. Or perhaps zero. Or perhaps one per project. We don't know yet.
Good analogue is automation. Mass-scale manufacturing jobs were replaced by a handful of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs. Certain career classes disappeared entirely.
> you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers
Of course you can. It's a team game. Having Ronaldo wearing your team's shirt doesn't guarantee a win. So a team of 11 cheaper footballers with a better plan and coaching has often beat whatever team Ronaldo plays on. "Cheaper" != "cheap" of course; they're still immensely talented and well-paid athletes.
What I mean is there's only eleven slots on the field. You can't swap one star player for a hundred mediocre ones. It's worth seeing which industries do and don't work like that.
I think the real breakthroughs will come from some randos or some researchers, not sure if throwing huge amounts of money to something is always the solution, otherwise many diseases would have been dealt with already.
Raising the bar for salaries to be so high creates a huge moat for all these massive companies. Meta and OpenAI can afford to pay $100M for 10-20 top employees, but that would consume the entire initial funding round for startups such as Superintelligence from Ilya Sustskever, who raised $2 billion.
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1. The $100M is a huge number. Maybe there was 1 person, working on large-scale training or finetuning, who had an offer like this, which surely was a high offer even in base (like let's say $1M+), and had a lot of stock and bonus clauses, which over 4+ years could have worked out to a big number. But I don't believe that the average SWE or DE ("staffer") working on the OpenAI ChatGPT UI Javascript would get this offer..
2. One of the comments here says "[Zuck] has mediocre talent". I worked at Facebook ~10 years ago, it was the highest concentration of talent I've ever seen in my life. I'm pretty sure it's still an impressive set of people overall.
Disclaimer: I don't work in the LLM space, not even in the US tech space anymore.
I also know many folks who’ve worked at Meta. Almost all of them are talented despite many working there regretfully.
Whenever I ask such people, they talk about the incredible perks, stock options, challenges. They do say they are overburdened though.
These are people who would be rich anyway, and could work anywhere, doing much more good.
I read it as he not talented himself. Not about the talent he employs.
I know Zuck personally and this is one of the big understandings to do with him. If you adjust his selector switch (just below the 3rd rib-like component on the pseudo thorax) to "science and engineering", you'll find he's the most brilliant guy ever, like Data from Star Trek! But this mode consumes some CPU cycles normally spent on hu-man interactions so he can come off as awkward.
A year or two back we switched it to "JW" (Jack Welch) and a sticky-fingered unix programmer spilled diet mountain dew all over the switch, it's been stuck there ever sense, hence here we are, hence the reputation for no-talent. It's there we just have to figure out how to get that switch jarred loose.
Deleted Comment
What a waste of a generation
And yet they don’t have much to show for it.
Dead Comment
Of course we have good reasons to be cynical about Sam Altman or Anthropic's Dario Amodei, but at least their public statements and blog posts pretend to envision a positive future where humanity is empowered. They might bring about ruinous disruption that humanity won't recover from while trying to do that, but at least they claim to care.
What is Zuckerberg's vision? AI generated friends for which there is a "demand" (because their social networks pivoted away from connecting humans) and genAI advertising to more easily hack people's reward centers.
Deleted Comment
And OpenAi probably had to renegotiate with those with a $100m offer so their costs went up.
Suppose it is karma for Zuckerberg, Meta have abused privacy so much many dislike them and won't work for them out of principle.
That sounds like the actual move here. Exploding your competitors cost structure because you're said to pay insane amounts of money for people willing to change...
On the other hand: People talk. If Meta will not pay that money that talk would probably go around...
If you define "best" as "not willing to leave", the statement "none of our best people have left" is actually near to a tautology. :-)
In both cases this is driven by "tournament wages": you can't replace Ronaldo with any number of cheaper footballers, because the size of your team is limited and the important metric is beating the other team.
It's also interesting to contrast this with the "AI will replace programmers" rhetoric. It sounds like the compensation curve is going to get steeper and steeper.
Steeper means: higher at the top. Lower on the bottom.
Right now, AI can do the job of the bottom large percentage of programmers better than those programmers. Look up how a disruptive S-curve works. At the end, we may be left with one programmer overseeing an AI "improving" itself. Or perhaps zero. Or perhaps one per project. We don't know yet.
Good analogue is automation. Mass-scale manufacturing jobs were replaced by a handful of higher-paid, higher-skilled jobs. Certain career classes disappeared entirely.
Of course you can. It's a team game. Having Ronaldo wearing your team's shirt doesn't guarantee a win. So a team of 11 cheaper footballers with a better plan and coaching has often beat whatever team Ronaldo plays on. "Cheaper" != "cheap" of course; they're still immensely talented and well-paid athletes.
Pretty sure Alexsandr Wang just blew Ronaldo out of the water.
Before that, the WhatsApp/Instagram founders.
[0] https://semianalysis.com/2023/05/04/google-we-have-no-moat-a...