> A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work.
Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
> Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention.
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The fact does not contradict economic analyses, it points out what a great shift there has been.
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
> People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI!
Yes, but do any of them work for Zuckerberg or with LeCun? The impression I've been getting is they see the idea of superintelligence as more like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, rather than as a Culture Mind.
The author of the article appears to think that Oppenheimer's intellectual contributions were superior to those of the "AI" implementers.
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
We let that article take precedence on the front page, as the top commenter on this thread makes a good point that the comparisons to the Manhattan Project and Space Race can be regarded a red herring and diminish the weight of the article. The NYT story on the front page focuses on the central topic of comp offers to A.I. talent.
Those two examples are government-run projects and in the case of the Manhattan project were part of a scheme with the main purpose of murdering people at a mass scale. The question there was more how much would we have had to pay those people not to do what they did.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.
In some ways it's a stupid comparison because back then people didn't take money that seriously because the state still knew how to hire serious talent and reward them with status instead.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766758 (except the ones responding to the title bit)
> A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
Where is the contradiction??? Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention. The AI researcher can be part of a small company and have a tiny chance of huge success, so direct connection to the value generated by his work. Also, it's not like Oppenheimer could get offers in the open market to get a bigger salary or extort other people not to drop a bomb without maybe dying in the process. But if he could, he could hire hundreds of those AI researches as assistants...
A failed LLM training run can easily be 100x more expensive than testing a bomb prototype. Accordingly, it might be worth it to splurge on the best operators to prevent misfires.
Also, the most difficult part of this job is probably that you need to lose against Zuckerberg in board games every week while pretending to try hard. That combination of extraordinary mathematics skill and extraordinary social skill is hard to come by ;)
> Oppenheimer was in no way connected to the "value" generated by his invention.
Oppenheimer didn’t just participate in nuclear bomb project. He has made contributions in nuclear physics has advanced nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
The fact does not contradict economic analyses, it points out what a great shift there has been.
Of course working for the atomic bomb or a cold war fuelled space race is also questionable, but the motivation of people doing it was for the perceived common greater good, while now we seem to be drowned in greed and vanity.
> for the perceived common greater good
Even if we agree with this myth, there is an infinite amount of that in AI! People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI! So even here there is no shift
> People literally think they'll save humanity if they invent AGI!
Yes, but do any of them work for Zuckerberg or with LeCun? The impression I've been getting is they see the idea of superintelligence as more like the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, rather than as a Culture Mind.
The author of the article appears to think that Oppenheimer's intellectual contributions were superior to those of the "AI" implementers.
If you analyze in purely capitalistic terms: Yes, being an uncreative middleman who steals what other people have created has always paid far better than being a scientist.
Now on front page:
A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250 Million Pay Packages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44766758
We let that article take precedence on the front page, as the top commenter on this thread makes a good point that the comparisons to the Manhattan Project and Space Race can be regarded a red herring and diminish the weight of the article. The NYT story on the front page focuses on the central topic of comp offers to A.I. talent.
Big difference was that at that time people were doing things both for the race itself but also because ideologically they believed in the mission.
I think people are ideologically aligned with the mission today. It's just that grifting off yet-another-hype-cycle is the mission.
Those two examples are government-run projects and in the case of the Manhattan project were part of a scheme with the main purpose of murdering people at a mass scale. The question there was more how much would we have had to pay those people not to do what they did.
These aren't good comparisons for someone who is doing work we expect, in advance, to be a net good. It isn't a particularly powerful comparison - we already might expect that private markets pay better just because people are deployed to useful work. It is actually a pretty reasonable suspicion that this bloke is going to do more than 300x as much good as Oppenheimer, both morally and commercially. Any deaths as a result of his direct work will be accidental.
In some ways it's a stupid comparison because back then people didn't take money that seriously because the state still knew how to hire serious talent and reward them with status instead.