High salaries for AI engineers: The talent war in AI
00:00:00.000 | What do you think about Meta buying up talent with huge salaries and the heating up of this
00:00:05.500 | battle for talent? You know, there's a strategy that Meta is taking right now. I think that from
00:00:11.640 | my perspective, at least, I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what
00:00:16.300 | it can do and understand the real consequences, both good and bad from that and what that
00:00:20.560 | responsibility entails, I think they're mostly doing it to be like myself, to be on the frontier
00:00:25.780 | of that research. So, you know, they can help influence the way that goes and steward that
00:00:31.440 | technology safely into the world. And, you know, Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe
00:00:35.820 | they'll manage to get back on there. And, you know, it's probably rational what they're doing
00:00:39.900 | from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something. But I think there's more
00:00:44.800 | important things than just money. Of course, one has to pay, you know, people their market rates and
00:00:49.220 | all of these things. And that continues to go up. And I was expecting this because more and more people
00:00:55.120 | are finally realizing, leaders of companies, what I've always known for 30 plus years now,
00:00:59.920 | which is that AGI is the most important technology probably that's ever going to be invented. So in
00:01:05.180 | some senses, it's rational to be doing that. But I also think there's a much bigger question. I mean,
00:01:10.560 | people in AI these days are very well paid. You know, I remember when we were starting out back in 2010,
00:01:16.380 | you know, I didn't even pay myself a couple of years because there wasn't enough money. We couldn't
00:01:20.160 | raise any money. And these days interns are being paid, you know, the amount that we raised as our
00:01:24.880 | first entire C round. So it's pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for
00:01:30.540 | free and almost pay my own way to do an internship, right? Now it's all the other way around. But that's
00:01:35.240 | just how it is. It's the new world. But I think that, you know, we've been discussing like what
00:01:39.340 | happens post AGI and energy systems are solved and so on. What is even money going to mean?
00:01:44.540 | And we're going to have much bigger issues to work through. And how does the economy function in that
00:01:49.140 | world and companies? So I think, you know, it's a little bit of a side issue about salaries and
00:01:54.560 | things like that today. Yeah. When you're facing such gigantic consequences and gigantic,
00:01:59.440 | fascinating scientific questions, which may be only a few years away.
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