[PheonixPharts]

> compensation packages that truly gifted AI researchers can make now

I guess it depends on your definition of "truly gifted" but, working in this space, I've found that there is very little correlation between comp and quality of AI research. There's absolutely some brilliant people working for big names and making serious money, there's also plenty of really talented people working for smaller startups doing incredible work but getting paid less, academics making very little, and even the occasional "hobbyist" making nothing and churning out great work while hiding behind an anime girl avatar.

OpenAI clearly has some talented people, but there's also a bunch of the typical "TC optimization" crowd in there these days. The fact that so many were willing to resign with sama if necessary appears largely because they were more concerned with losing their nice compensation packages than any of their obsession with doing top tier research.

[kccqzy]

Two people I knew recently left Google to join OpenAI. They were solid L5 engineers on the verge of being promoted to L6, and their TC is now $900k. And they are not even doing AI research, just general backend infra. You don't need to be gifted, just good. And of course I can't really fault them for joining a company for the purpose of optimizing TC.

[raydev]

> their TC is now $900k

As a community we should stop throwing numbers around like this when more than half of this number is speculative. You shouldn't be able to count it as "total compensation" unless you are compensated.

[nojvek]

Word on town is OpenAI folks heavily selling shares in secondaries in 100s of millions.

The number is as real as someone else is willing to pay for them. Plenty of VCs willing to pay for it.

[michaelt]

Word in town is [1] openai "plans" to let employees sell "some" equity through a "tender process" which ex-employees are excluded from; and also that openai can "claw back" vested equity, and has used the threat of doing so in the past to pressure people into signing sketchy legal documents.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/11/openai-insider-stock-sales-a...

[comp_throw7]

I would definitely discount OpenAI equity compared to even other private AI labs (i.e. Anthropic) given the shenanigans, but they have in fact held 3 tender offers and former employees were not, as far as we know, excluded (though they may have been limited to selling $2m worth of equity, rather than $10m).

[JumpCrisscross]

> Word on town is OpenAI folks heavily selling shares in secondaries in 100s of millions

OpenAI heavily restricts the selling of its "shares," which tends to come with management picking the winners and losers among its ESOs. Heavily, heavily discount an asset you cannot liquidate without someone's position, particularly if that person is your employer.

[shuckles]

Did you mean permission, not position? I’m not sure I understand what someone’s position could mean.

[JumpCrisscross]

Yes.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

You have no idea what youre talking about

[whimsicalism]

don’t comment if you don’t know what you’re talking about, they have tender offers

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Google itself is now filled with TC optimizing folks, just one level lower than the ones at Open AI.

[almostgotcaught]

> their TC is now $900k.

Everyone knows that openai TC is heavily weighted by ~~RSUs~~ options that themselves are heavily weighted by hopes and dreams.

[doktorhladnjak]

When I looked into it and talked to some hiring managers, the big names were offering cash comp similar to total comp for big tech, with stock (sometimes complicated arrangements that were not options or RSUs) on top of that. I’m talking $400k cash for a senior engineer with equity on top.

[almostgotcaught]

> big names

Big names where? Inside of openai? What does that even mean?

The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi

[whimsicalism]

> The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi

confident yet wrong

not only can you get that much at AI companies, netflix will also pay that much all cash - and that’s fully public info

[almostgotcaught]

> not only can you get that much at AI companies

Please show not tell

> netflix will also pay that much all cash

Okay that's true

[vlovich123]

Netflix is just cash, no stock. That’s different from 400k stock + cash.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Amazon pays 400k cash lol. Many companies do

[almostgotcaught]

Up until 2 years ago you were extremely wrong and you're still wrong: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/amazon-is...

It's amazing to me how many people are willing to just say the first thing that comes to their head while knowing they can be fact-checked in a heartbeat.

[HeatrayEnjoyer]

Everything OpenAI does is about weights.

[DaiPlusPlus]

bro does their ceo even lift?

[almost_usual]

You mean PPUs or smoke and mirrors compensation. RSUs are actually worth something.

[whimsicalism]

why are PPUs “smoke and mirrors” and RSUs “worth something”?

i suspect people commenting this don’t have a clue how PPU compensation actually works

[almost_usual]

> Note at offer time candidates do not know how many PPUs they will be receiving or how many exist in total. This is important because it’s not clear to candidates if they are receiving 1% or 0.001% of profits for instance. Even when giving options, some startups are often unclear or simply do not share the total number of outstanding shares. That said, this is generally considered bad practice and unfavorable for employees. Additionally, tender offers are not guaranteed to happen and the cadence may also not be known.

> PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years. Another key difference is that the growth is currently capped at 10x. Similar to their overall company structure, the PPUs are capped at a growth of 10 times the original value. So in the offer example above, the candidate received $2M worth of PPUs, which means that their capped amount they could sell them for would be $20M

> The most recent liquidation event we’re aware of happened during a tender offer earlier this year. It was during this event that some early employees were able to sell their profit participation units. It’s difficult to know how often these events happen and who is allowed to sell, though, as it’s on company discretion.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

Edit:

I’m realizing we had the exact same conversation a month ago. It sounds like you have more insider information.

[iknownthing]

Seems like you need to have been working at a place like Google too

[whimsicalism]

the thing about mentioning compensation numbers on HN is you will get tons of pissy/ressentiment-y replies

[kccqzy]

I don't care about these. I care about the readers who might not have done job searching recently and might not know their worth in the market.

[a-dub]

"...even the occasional "hobbyist" making nothing and churning out great work while hiding behind an anime girl avatar."

the people i often have the most respect for.

[torginus]

Half the advancements around Stable Diffusion (Controlnet etc.) came from internet randoms wanting better anime waifus

[whimsicalism]

advancements around parameter efficient fine tuning came from internet randoms because big cos don’t care about PEFT

[Der_Einzige]

... Sort of?

HF is sort of big now. Stanford is well funded and they did PyReft.

[whimsicalism]

HF is not very big, Stanford doesn’t have lots of compute.

Neither of these are even remotely big labs like what I’m discussing

[nmfisher]

HF has raised more than $400m. If that doesn't qualify them as "big", I don't know what does.

[auggierose]

TC optimization being tail call optimization?

[klyrs]

You don't get to that level by thinking about code...

[lbotos]

Could be sarcasm, but I'll engage in good faith: Total Compensation

[samatman]

Nope, that's a misnomer, it's tail-call elimination. You can't call it an optimization if it's essential for proper functioning of the program.

(they mean total compensation)

[cozzyd]

Curie temperature

[015a]

Definitely true of even normal software engineering; my experience has been the opposite of expectations, that TC-creep has infected the industry to an irreparable degree and the most talented people I've ever worked around or with are in boring, medium-sized enterprises in the midwest US or australia, you'll probably never hear of them, and every big tech company would absolutely love to hire them but just can't figure out the interview process to weed them apart from the TC grifters.

TC is actually totally uncorrelated with the quality of talent you can hire, beyond some low number that pretty much any funded startup could pay. Businesses hate to hear this, because money is easy to turn the dial up on; but most have no idea how to turn the dial up on what really matters to high talent individuals. Fortunately, I doubt Ilya will have any problem with that.

[fromMars]

I find this hard to believe having worked in multiple enterprises and in the FAANG world.

In my anecdotal experience, I can only think of one or two examples of someone from the enterprise world who I would consider outstanding.

The overall quality of engineers is much higher at the FAANG companies.

[null0pointer]

I have also worked in multiple different sized companies, including FAANG, and multiple countries. My assessment is that FAANGs tend to select for generally intelligent people who can learn quickly and adapt to new situations easily but who nowadays tend to be passionless and indifferent to anything but money and prestige. Personally I think passion is the differentiator here, rather than talent, when it comes to doing a good job. Passion means caring about your work and its impact beyond what it means for your own career advancement. It means caring about building the best possible products where “best” is defined as delivering the most value for your users rather than the most value for the company. The question is whether big tech is unable to select for passion or whether there are simply not enough passionate people to hire when operating at FAANG scale. Most likely it’s the latter.

So I guess I agree with both you and the parent comment somewhat in that in general the bar is higher at FAANGs but at the same time I have multiple former colleagues from smaller companies who I consider to be excellent, passionate engineers but who cannot be lured to big tech by any amount of money or prestige (I’ve tried). While many passionless “arbitrary metric optimizers” happily join FAANGs and do whatever needs to be done to climb the ladder without a second thought.

[fromMars]

I sort of agree and disagree. I wouldn't agree with the idea that most FAANG engineers are not passionate by nature about their work.

What I would say is that the bureaucracy and bullshit one has to deal with makes it hard to maintain that passion and that many end up as TC optimizers in the sense that they stay instead of working someplace better for less TC.

That said, I am not sure how many would make different choices. Many who join a FAANG company don't have the slightest inkling of what it will be like and once they realize that they are tiny cog in a giant machine it's hard to leave the TC and perks behind.

[whimsicalism]

perfect sort of thing to say to get lots of upvotes, but absolutely false in my experience at both enterprise and bigtech