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Comment by jimsimmons | Hacker News Reader

Curious if anyone can confirm $5-20M figure. Seems absurdly high but what do I know

Can't confirm OpenAI's position in particular, but $500k/yr/person is table stakes for a decent engineer directly connected to the company's bottom line. Double that for an actual expert, double it again if they're consulting, and put together a team of 3-10 of them. Those numbers aren't too far off.

I can see $5M per person being possible. $20M is the absurd part. 5 years with such a comp leads one to a net worth that is borderline filthy. Like elite, world renown athletes and actors level of wealth. Again, could all be true but just unexpected from my experience.

$5-20M in total yearly salaries, not per person. I think...

I mean if you are the top expert that will change the face of humanity, that is vastly more valuable then an athlet that entertains people, no !?

They certainly have that value. I wonder if they have that monetary value in modern capitalist society

> I can see $5M per person being possible. $20M is the absurd part. 5 years with such a comp leads one to a net worth that is borderline filthy. Like elite, world renown athletes and actors level of wealth.

5 years at $20 million equals the highest paid FIFA player’s single year pay (or Tom Cruise’s pay for one movie, Top Gun: Maverick), or about two years of the highest paid NFL players, so it won't catch up the their wealth over that time (assuming similar lifestyle) as its losing ground to them every year.

(And the claim was total, not per person, salary, anyway.)

Highest paid is a different metric though. Highest paid AI person is probably Ilya Sutskever who owns a good chunk of OpenAI and is worth billions

Those are highest salaries, they don’t include capital returns. Unsurprisingly, people make 7 figure salaries in sports, and who have been doing so for more than a few years, often have significant capital returns, as well.

There are CEOs that get paid a lot more than $5M/year in stock. Arguably that's also ridiculous, but it's certainly possible that paying a team of 20 highly skilled engineers $5M/year each brings more value to the company than paying a CEO $100M a year.

$20M in startup stock is not the same as $20M in Apple stock. I can totally believe OpenAI paying that figure on paper. You’d need to adjust the number for risk though

I wouldn't put any stock into a random twitter rumor by someone likely looking for clout. The source, some guy with likely a purchased checkmark and 12k followers (who knows how few before he claimed to have this insider knowledge), claims four(!) different "extremely reputable" sources that have independently confirmed it. How many people exactly are they making these offers to? Do they all happen to know this guy, someone with no discretion apparently, and everyone decided to tell him this information for what reason exactly?

99% chance it's made up.

That said, if they thought a specific individual had even a reasonable chance of coming up with an improvement on the current state-of-the-art AI architecture that they'd be able to keep entirely to themselves, $20M would be a massive bargain.

The rumor is still almost certainly fake, but for someone very specific at this critical time in the field, I don't know if the number would be that absurd.

Good point. Super unlikely that the top people all know this guy. There are probably a hundred or so of them in the whole world.

I’d pay creator of GPT that money easily. Probably not anyone else

Twitter rumors also claimed a parameter count of 100 trillion parameters and they visualized it with two circles with a huge size difference to make it look intimidating.

I guess the reason why AI is so interesting is that human stupidity is so widespread.

Here was my only source of the rumor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35565025

maybe it's not per-person but the total for a small group. 7 6-figure salaries doesn't seem absurd.

You mean 6 7-figure salaries

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