Comment by roadside_picnic

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).