Comment by AIPedant

7 months ago

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.

11 comments

AIPedant

Reply
brandall10  7 months ago

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  7 months ago

    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.

    • brandall10  7 months ago

      We’ve seen $T+ scale impacts from AI over the past few years.

      You can argue the distribution is hard to pin down (hence my note on risk), but let’s not pretend there’s zero precedent.

      If it turns out to be another winter at least it will have been a fucking blizzard.

      3 replies →

  • jgalt212  7 months ago

    If you imagine hard enough, you can expect anything. e.g. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

    • brandall10  7 months ago

      Sure, but the idea these hires could pay out big is within the realm of actual reality, even if AGI itself remains a pipe dream. It’s not like AI hasn’t already had a massive impact on global commerce and markets.

ojbyrne  7 months ago

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.

ignoramous  7 months ago

Another major difference is, BigTech is bigger than these global sporting institutions.

How much revenue does Google make in a day? £700m+.