Comment by TrackerFF
3 days ago
Also, the people being hired now for insane sums of money, are being hired because they have deep knowledge in design / implementation of AI models and infrastructure that scale to billions of users.
In order to operate on a scale like that, you obviously need to have worked somewhere that has that magnitude of users. That makes the pool of candidates quite small.
It’s like building a spaceship. Do you hire the people that have only worked on simulations, or do you try to hire the people that have actually been part of building the most advanced spaceship to date? Given that you’re also in a race against other competitors.
With all these mega-offers going out, I object when people saying that they’re paying for “talent”.
These AI folks are good, but not orders of magnitude better than engineers and researchers already working in tech or academia. Lots of folks are capable of building an AI system, the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been in a situation where they have the time/money/freedom to do it.
These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
> These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
Well, yes.
Talent doesn't exist in the form people would like to believe, and to whatever degree it does, experience is the most reliable proxy for identifying it.
As one of the many people who are fairly experienced in AI (but at small startups) and hasn't had Zuck personally knock on my door, I have had a few moments of "wait, 9 figure salary? Can I at least get 7 figures?"
But the truth is it's not "just" about experience. Most of these people have been pushing the limits of their fields for their entire careers. It's not like having "the time/money/freedom" to do it is randomly distributed even among talented, smart people. The people in this talent pool where all likely aggressive researchers in a very specialized field, then likely fought hard to get on elite teams working close to the metal on these massive scale inference problems, and they continued to follow this path until they got where they are.
And the truth is, if you're at least "good" in this space, you do get your piece of the pie at the appropriate scale. I'm still making regular dev income, but my last round of job searching (just a few months ago) was insane. I had to quit my job early because I couldn't manage the all the teams I was talking to. I've been through some hot tech markets over my career, but never anything like this. Meanwhile many of my non-AI peers are really struggling to find new roles.
So there's no reason to cast shade on the genuine talent of these people (though I think we all feel that frustration from time to time).
I would call it "skill".
I feel left out too, friend
> These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
I'm sorry, but what's the specific distinction? When the Lakers pay Lebron $54MM per season, is that for his innate talent, or is it for the 20k hours he's spent perfecting his game?
This is a lot of hand-wringing over nothing. We've seen people paid outrageous sums of money for throwing a ball for DECADES without any complaints, but the moment a filthy computer nerd is paid the same money to build models, it's pitchforks time.
The only thing wrong with the current compensation kerfuffle is that it happened so late. People like Einstein, Von Neumann, Maxwell, Borlaug, etc should have been compensated like sportsball stars, as well.
> Also, the people being hired now for insane sums of money, are being hired because they have deep knowledge in design / implementation of AI models and infrastructure that scale to billions of users.
That's what they want you to believe, and in some cases that's true. Many though are just grifters. They were able to:
1. Gain access to the right people at the right levels to have the right conversations.
2. Build on that access to gain influence focused on AI hype
3. Turn that access/influence into income
That doesn't necessarily imply /anything/ about their actual delivery performance or technical prowess.