Comment by SamvitJ
7 months ago
One way to make sense of this specific case at least.
- He's on track to becoming a top-tier AI researcher. Despite having only one year of a PhD under his belt, he already received two top awards as a first-author at major AI conferences [1]. Typically, it takes many more years of experience to do research that receives this level of recognition. Most PhDs never get there.
- Molmo, the slate of open vision-language models that he built & released as an academic [2], has direct bearing on Zuck's vision for personalized, multimodal AI at Meta.
- He had to be poached from something, in this case, his own startup, where in the best case, his equity could be worth a large multiple of his Meta offer. $250M likely exceeded the expected value of success, in his view, at the startup. There was also probably a large premium required to convince him to leave his own thing (which he left his PhD to start) to become a hired hand for Meta.
Sources:
> could be worth...
Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?
> What's the likelihood of that?
Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)
Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?
22 replies →
It might make more sense to think of in terms of expected value. Whilst the probability may be low, the payoff is probably many times the $250M if their startup becomes successful.
You can only one roll in the crapshoot of life though.
It's strange that Zuck didn't just buy options on that guy? (Or did he? Would love to see the terms.)
Zuck's advantage over Sir Isaac (Newton) is that the market for top AI researchers is much more volatile than in South Sea tradeables pre-bubble burst?
Either that or 250M is cheap for cognitive behavior therapy
What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.
In this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.
This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.
But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.
This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.
Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.
I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~=2.5 at most!
I hope for all of our sake's that you're right. I feel confident that you're not :(
Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence".
We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products are an office suite and "study mode".
https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo...
https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/
This is EXACTLY the same as NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Mars. Some gurus and thought leaders talk big talk while taking gullible investors' money and hope nobody asks them how they plan to turn in a profit.
My edgy prediction is that blunder after blunder (Metaverse, LLAMA, the enshittification of whatsapp, instagram losing heavily to tiktok and facebook having mostly dead accounts) and now giving 250M in vapor-money to youngsters, this is Meta's last stab in the dark before they finally get exposed for how irrelevant they are. Then no amount of groveling to Trump or MMA would be able to save the Zuck from being seen for what he really is: an irrelevant morally bankrupt douche (I could say the same about Elon as well) just trying out random stuff and talking big.
15 replies →
Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.
Woah, a whopping 0.5%. That's like working 12 minutes more every week. I waste much more time every day because of how slow and sluggish Windows 11 is.
4 replies →
There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.
5 replies →
If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble.
I have two questions about this, really:
- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?
- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?
That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?
The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.
The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.
"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.
For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.
But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.
And that could burst your bubble.
4 replies →
Woo
Nightmare Future!
I agree on all points. However, if he already had several millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?
I’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.
And it's only temporary too, he can work for Meta for a few years and then do whatever he wants for the rest of his life.
I weep for humanity.
17 replies →
> Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?
Meta will have more AI-compute than he ever hoped to get at his - and most other - startups.
This is such a weird sentiment to me, comparing taking one of the highest paying corporate jobs in the history of humanity to bowing down to some dictator.
He probably heard the memes, didn't really want to work for Meta and said a "ridiculous" high number and Meta was like: we can do that.
[flagged]
Please don't post shallow dismissals... - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's fine to think that we're in a bubble and to post a comment explaining your thoughts about it. But a comment like this is a low-effort, drive-by shoot-down of a comment that took at least a bit of thought and effort, and that's exactly what we don't want on HN.
Various BigCo-s have been reporting good results recently and highlighted significant AI role in that. That may be a BS of course, yet even if it is half-true we're talking about tens/hundreds of billions of revenues. With 10x multiple it supports a trillion like generic valuation of AI in business right now.
Zuckerberg had a lot to say about AI in his part of Meta's Q2 earnings statement, but the follow-up earnings call [0] revealed the rather limited scope of AI in their ad business so far:
>"The first is enabling business AIs within message threads ... We’re expanding business AIs to more businesses in Mexico and the Philippines. And we expect to broaden availability later this year as we keep refining the product."
>"The second area of business AI development is within ads ... We’re currently testing this with a small number of businesses across Feed and Reels on Facebook and Instagram as well as Instagram Stories."
>"And then the final area that we are exploring is business AIs on business websites to help better support businesses across all platforms ... and we’re starting to test that with a few businesses in the US."
So it's just very small scale tests so far - not the sort of thing that would have any measurable impact on their revenue.
[0]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2...
How much has the whole industry invested in AI vs how much revenue has AI generated in total?
Molmo caught my eye also a while ago.
Same except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree
It's also possible, based on what happens to those who win the lottery, that his life could become a lot harder. It's not great to have the fact that you're making $2M a week plastered all over the Internet.