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High salaries for AI engineers: The talent war in AI


Transcript

What do you think about Meta buying up talent with huge salaries and the heating up of this battle for talent? You know, there's a strategy that Meta is taking right now. I think that from my perspective, at least, I think the people that are real believers in the mission of AGI and what it can do and understand the real consequences, both good and bad from that and what that responsibility entails, I think they're mostly doing it to be like myself, to be on the frontier of that research.

So, you know, they can help influence the way that goes and steward that technology safely into the world. And, you know, Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they'll manage to get back on there. And, you know, it's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something.

But I think there's more important things than just money. Of course, one has to pay, you know, people their market rates and all of these things. And that continues to go up. And I was expecting this because more and more people are finally realizing, leaders of companies, what I've always known for 30 plus years now, which is that AGI is the most important technology probably that's ever going to be invented.

So in some senses, it's rational to be doing that. But I also think there's a much bigger question. I mean, people in AI these days are very well paid. You know, I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, you know, I didn't even pay myself a couple of years because there wasn't enough money.

We couldn't raise any money. And these days interns are being paid, you know, the amount that we raised as our first entire C round. So it's pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship, right?

Now it's all the other way around. But that's just how it is. It's the new world. But I think that, you know, we've been discussing like what happens post AGI and energy systems are solved and so on. What is even money going to mean? And we're going to have much bigger issues to work through.

And how does the economy function in that world and companies? So I think, you know, it's a little bit of a side issue about salaries and things like that today. Yeah. When you're facing such gigantic consequences and gigantic, fascinating scientific questions, which may be only a few years away.

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