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A 24 year-old AI researcher will earn 327x what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
Silicon Valley's AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone—it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. That includes salaries during the development of major scientific milestones of the 20th century.
The New York Times reported that Deitke had cofounded a startup called Vercept and previously led the development of Molmo, a multimodal AI system, at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His expertise in systems that juggle images, sounds, and text—exactly the kind of technology Meta wants to build—made him a prime target for recruitment. But he's not alone: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years. What's going on?
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195 sats \ 2 replies \ @aljaz 7h
Why is everyone upset about these compensations but when we have monkeys running around with a leather ball this compensation totally doesn't shock anyone?
Or movie stars getting tons of money?
Imagine some fucking athlete being paid more than Oppenheimer for anything under the sun? How the fuck is that not a conversation for the past decades
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Guess many people don't agree/see that certain tech people are truly better than others. Most people see AI engineers as perfectly interchangeable. Yet, they somehow agree that a Messi or a Ronaldo is truly better than most other football players out there.
The market disagrees.
(I still think the numbers are absurd in both cases, but I agree with your point)
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 2h
Didn't Meta stock jump like crazy after going on this hiring spree? I thought I heard it ended up paying for itself...
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 7h
I love to see the private market developing capital intensive tech like this. We always used to hear that we need government for big costly infrastructure.......clearly not. If there is perceived demand then billionaires will invest.
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60 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 9h
What's going on?
Inflation.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @teemupleb 4h
When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone
I wonder if Deitke is smart enough to stack bitcoin
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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @OT 8h
Is that inflation adjusted?
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To put these salaries in a historical perspective: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that ended World War II, earned approximately $10,000 per year in 1943. Adjusted for inflation using the US Government's CPI Inflation Calculator, that's about $190,865 in today's dollars—roughly what a senior software engineer makes today. The 24-year-old Deitke, who recently dropped out of a PhD program, will earn approximately 327 times what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb.
Seems it is.
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5 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 8h
I don't understand how the company makes it back. Even if it is a winner take all won't open source LLM's learn from it and catch up driving the price toward zero?
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They don't. It's a pissing contest
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that is really a made made world
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Irrational exuberance of vain billioners racing to AGI.
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