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Comment by hansvm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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