[m0zg]

Why give up _anything_ and not go to e.g. Google Brain or FAIR or MSR instead? All three labs have dozens of people of comparable caliber _each_. At this point Apple is starting at a massive disadvantage, and they'd need to offer a radically better game to catch up. Which is something they aren't prepared to do.

[weaklearner]

If your researched is focused on Gans/adversarial stuff the specificity of working with goodfellow might out-weigh some other concerns. Also-hey-I'm not trying to make this tradeoff. I am just saying I can imagine someone else choosing to do so.

personally if I had offer from Google/MSR I'd take it over apple but I'd much rather work for apple than facebook even if yann le cunn told me I was cooler than sliced bread.

edit: also re-reading your comment I bet apple is willing to pay that crazy money. Goodfellow probably has compensation in 1-10 million range...

[m0zg]

7 figures is table stakes for top people in this field. The question is, what the distribution is like for the kinds of folks they need to hire to get the actual work done.