Comment by 42lux

2 days ago

What I don't get is that they are gunning for the people that brought us the innovations we are working with right now. How often does it happen that someone really strikes gold a second time in research at such a high level? It's not a sport.

19 comments

42lux

Reply
gdbsjjdn  2 days ago

You're falling victim to the Gambler's Fallacy - it's like saying "the coin just flipped heads, so I choose tails, it's unlikely this coin flips heads twice in a row".

Realistically they have to draw from a small pool of people with expertise in the field. It is unlikely _anyone_ they hire will "strike gold", but past success doesn't make future success _less_ likely. At a minimum I would assume past success is uncorrelated with future success, and at best there's a weak positive correlation because of reputation, social factors, etc.

kkoncevicius  2 days ago

Even if they do not strike gold the second time, there can still be a multitude of reasons:

  1. The innovators will know a lot about the details, limitations and potential improvements concerning the thing they invented.
  2. Having a big name in your research team will attract other people to work with you.
  3. I assume the people who discovered something still have a higher chance to discover something big compared to "average" researchers.
  4. That person will not be hired by your competition.

  • cma  2 days ago

    5. Having a lot of very publicly extremely highly paid people will make people assume anyone working on AI there is highly paid, if not quite as extreme. What most people who make a lot of money spend it on is wealth signalling, and now they can get a form of that without the company having to pay them as much.

this_user  2 days ago

Who else would you hire? With a topic as complex as this, it seems most likely that the people who have been working at the bleeding edge for years will be able to continue to innovate. At the very least, they are a much safer bet than some unproven randos.

  • Closi  2 days ago

    Exactly this - people that understood the field well enough to add new knowledge to it has to be a pretty decent signal for a research-level engineer.

    At the research level it’s not just about being smart enough, or being a good programmer, or even completely understanding the field - it’s also about having an intuitive understanding of the field where you can self pursue research directions that are novel enough and yield results. Hard to prove that without having done it before.

croes  2 days ago

Because the innovations fail to deliver what was promised and the overall costs are higher than the outcome

MichaelRazum  2 days ago

How about Ilya