OpenAI Pays Bonuses Ranging Up To Millions of Dollars To 1,000 Researchers, Engineers (theinformation.com) 19
An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI is paying bonuses to around 1,000 employees on its technical research and engineering teams, or about a third of the company, ranging from the low hundreds of thousands to millions, as the company gears up to release its latest flagship GPT-5 model and faces an ever-rising battle for AI talent, according to a person with knowledge of the bonuses.
Are they aware... (Score:2)
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Cash out while there's still time.
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We get it, you have a "killer screenplay" you're shopping around. I'll save you the trouble, it's been done before.
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Exactly. With millions of dollars properly invested, that basically means when they get replaced, they can live off the savings, especially interest. ($5M invested at 5% will earn you $250K/year).
Where does all this money come from? (Score:1)
We're (collective we here) throwing a *LOT* of money at AI right now. Is it coming from a tangible source of income, or is it all built on speculative possibilities of a time to come? Because whether AI does what the prophets are telling us it will do or not, you can only run on speculation for so long before you need a full-blown steady stream of revenue, especially if you're tossing millions at individual researchers involved.
A) Is the spending justified by real world income today or is it all based on wh
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>> B) Are they just paying these folks astronomical amounts today to get them to look the other way when the inevitable happens and one of these systems does some society-wide harm beyond just killing jobs.
I think we could start to argue that the rate at which AI is displacing jobs is already causing harm. And no, I'm not advocating that we need to stop progress. But we do need to consider how fast we call can pivot to new jobs.
So are they paying these guys astronomical amounts to look the other w
Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score:2)
Dunno whether it has occurred to either of you that most of the "money" being paid isn't actually money.
The way I personally look at my own work is this: If my job can be automated, then it's really not a job that I'm interested in doing. Though people like me are just wired differently from you guys, I guess. If I find myself doing the same shit over and over again, I consider that to be a rut, and the thought on my mind will quickly become "how do I automate this crap so that nobody has to do it?"
I'm not
Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score:3)
It's speculation. AI may become the biggest shift in the market and society in all of human history. Like telephone, internet, smartphone, and tractor all rolled into one massive paradigm shift.
I believe the intent of AI startups is to be in early to capture a slice of a potentially massive market. But I am less confident that the winners will automatically be the early adopters.
Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score:2)
Do you understand that as stocks go up, so does the money supply because you can use those rising values as collateral and banks will happily create loans, knowing that even if a dot-com crash occurs the Fed will backstop all thst privately created money with publicly created money, and things will be back to profits as usual in a couple years?
Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score:2)
Stocks are kind of crazy at this level. You basically can get a credit line (like an LAL) for around half of the stock you hold. For some in the tech field they might have 1-5 million in assets they are treating as retirement. But can borrow from it tax free to write a check for a $2m home. Exactly the sort of shit that messed up the real estate market in the SF Bay Area. The rich don't have the same rules as the working class.
Re: Where does all this money come from? (Score:2)
OpenAI has $12bn annual revenue, about 3% that of Apple, about $3million per employees per year (compared to $2 million per employee per year at Apple).
I think OpenAI has a huge amount of growth potential even just from predictable growth over the next several years, even if steep changes towards AGI don't come.
Is the real shortage then talent, not electricity? (Score:2)
How much electricity will a billion dollars buy you?
Re: Is the real shortage then talent, not electric (Score:2)
Unfortunetly the scalability of AI is not infinite. There is a point of diminising returns. Some of what AI researchers are up to is either doing more with less, or with making bigger clusters that are better connected.
Watching this happen (Score:1)