A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages
206 comments
·August 2, 2025BSOhealth
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.
cm2187
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.
stocksinsmocks
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.
moomin
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.
gherkinnn
Sounds vindictive. And yet. According to Forbes, the top 8 richest people have a tech background, most of whom are "nerdy" by some definition.
hkt
Those are nerds who did founding rather than being an employee, though. Maybe that's the distinction they're trying to make?
layer8
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
how do you know they are nerds?
bbminner
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.
bbminner
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?
TrackerFF
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
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.
riku_iki
> 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.
those figures is payment for access to know-how knowledge developed by competitors, those people are not necessary "extremely smart".
magic_man
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?
thefaux
Yeah, who knew that Kerr would have the more successful overall career in basketball?
AIPedant
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.
brandall10
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.
AIPedant
The expected value is itself a random variable, there is always a chance you mischaracterized the underlying distribution. For sports stars the variance in the expected value is extremely small, even if the variance in the sample value is quite large - it might be hard to predict how an individual sports star will do, but there is enough data to get a sense of the overall distribution and identify potential outliers.
For AI researchers pursuing AGI, this variance between distributions is arguably even worse than the distribution between samples - there's no past data whatsoever to build estimates, it's all vibes.
jgalt212
If you imagine hard enough, you can expect anything. e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
ojbyrne
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
OOf. Trying awfully hard to have a bad day there eh?
ignoramous
Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these global sporting institutions.
How much revenue does Google make in a day? £700m+.
null
oldstrangers
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.
TheAceOfHearts
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?
walterbell
> Imagine.. had all the keys needed
.. that had already leaked and would later plummet in value.
noobermin
When the crash hits, it will hit hard.
fidotron
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.
MichaelZuo
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
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.
turnsout
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world.
He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam Altman.
The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will still probably get the credit as the visionary.
lores
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
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.
MichaelZuo
First rate A-players are beyond petty ego clashes, practically by definition… otherwise they wouldn’t be considered so highly (and thus fall into the bozo category).
InterviewFrog
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
> 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.
ujkiolp
[dead]
TrackerFF
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.
ofjcihen
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.
2OEH8eoCRo0
They're being paid to not do their own startup and become competition.
dekhn
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.
BrenBarn
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.
meekaaku
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.
gherkinnn
My personal negativity stems from Meta in particular having a net negative 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.
ehnto
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
ok maybe bat an eyelid,
but I dont see news articles about athletes in such negativity, citing their young age etc.
IncreasePosts
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
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
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?
meekaaku
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.
therealdrag0
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.
8f2ab37a-ed6c
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?
layer8
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.
turnsout
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_crab
This is one of those comments that is enjoyably cynical…and conceivably accurate.
https://archive.is/t9HRT