Comment by guyomes
3 years ago
> A hacker news rumor was that they are paying $5M-$20M per year to the top neural net experts probably to make some exotic architectures to surpass transformer
This reminds me a TV interview of the author Patrick Modiano, just after he won the literature Nobel price. The presenter asked him if the money would help. The author answered essentially that the next time he would be in front of a white page, the money surely wouldn't help.
In the case of surpassing transformers, money could help to give access to more compute power. It could also help to prevent the research from being public.
Modiano is a rich man, born into a rich family. Wealth doesn't help in front of a white page, but it sure helps being able to stay in front of that white page instead of having to go take up a job because you're not sure what you're eating tonight.
As always, wealthy people and their "money doesn't make happiness" bullshit.
Since he already didn't need to work another job to pay the bills, the extra money from the Nobel prize does not make a difference in this case as he can already put all his time into writing.
Money doesn't buy happiness, but it staves off abject sadness.
If someone is already working on a problem full-time, money only helps to the extent that resources they can be buy with money are the limiting constraint. However, beyond deep work needed for a single individual, when you need to explore potential opportunities in a broad space of possibilities, money can hugely effect the search of that space because work needed for major breakthroughs remains parallelizable. You can delegate subtasks to people if you can afford those people. You can hire more of the few specialized people who know about a niche to work on your problem instead of other problems. You can exploit synergies from crosspollination of ideas from bringing together brilliant minds into the same conversations. The influx of money is very very likely to increase the pace of innovation in AI. The breadth of possible avenues for breakthroughs is largely yet-to-be-explored.