Meta dishes out $250M to lure 24-year-old AI whiz kid

12 hours ago (nypost.com)

Not to make less of the guy, but aside from being a winner of a paper contest, the other ventures do not seem very novel: a startup to create AI agents that can use the Internet? Seems…common.

I suppose I’d rather hire 250 bright kids with $1 million package each instead, but I suppose it gets pr.

  • Just glancing through the article, it seems like this person is a doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid") and their doctorate is literally in the exact thing that everyone is throwing gobs and gobs of cash at. And I guess Meta (et al) sense that literal empires are at stake here, so this is probably just how much money that's worth to them.

    • > doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid")

      Media has this strange need for fully-grown responsible adults to be thought of as children. Not only for the amazing stories of "this (mid-30s career professional) kid did something", but also helpful to try and shirk responsibility.

      Thinking about attempts to frame SBF as a wee smol bean kid in over his head while actively committing fraud.

I think Meta has a problem of none of their users wanting any more of their services and they have a very distinct brand taint

Paying 250m to a genius to more deeply entrap user time and attention is going to look diabolical unless there are measurable user life improvement outcome measurements... if metas more slop addiction that 250m is a diabolical contract