[SamvitJ]

One way to make sense of this specific case at least.

- He's on track to becoming a top-tier AI researcher. Despite having only one year of a PhD under his belt, he already received two top awards as a first-author at major AI conferences [1]. Typically, it takes many more years of experience to do research that receives this level of recognition. Most PhDs never get there.

- Molmo, the slate of open vision-language models that he built & released as an academic [2], has direct bearing on Zuck's vision for personalized, multimodal AI at Meta.

- He had to be poached from something, in this case, his own startup, where in the best case, his equity could be worth a large multiple of his Meta offer. $250M likely exceeded the expected value of success, in his view, at the startup. There was also probably a large premium required to convince him to leave his own thing (which he left his PhD to start) to become a hired hand for Meta.

Sources:

[1] https://mattdeitke.com/

[2] https://allenai.org/blog/molmo

[tantalor]

> could be worth...

Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?

[aleph_minus_one]

> What's the likelihood of that?

Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)

[siscia]

Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?

[SturgeonsLaw]

If it were me, yeah, park it in bonds and live off the interest on a tropical beach. Spend my days spearfishing and drinking beers with the locals. Have no concerns except how even my tan is (and tbh I don't see myself caring too much about that).

I'd forget the word shareholder even exists.

[nopinsight]

Sounds good in theory but I'd be bored to death in a month, at most two. Traveling the world...maybe good for a few more months and that's it.

Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

[aleph_minus_one]

> Wouldn't you yearn for any more impact given how much that amount of resource could improve the lives of many, if used wisely?

Cynical take: increasing Meta's stock value does improve the lifes of many - the many stock holders.

Thus: when you talk about improving lifes, you better specify which group you are targeting, and why you selected this particular group.

[Mistletoe]

The world is sufficiently large and complex that a few months wouldn’t even scrape the tip of the iceberg.

[bildung]

If you want to improve the lives of many, by all means go for it, I think that is a wonderful ambition to have in live and something I strive for, too!

But we are talking about an ad company here, trying to branch out into ai to sell more ads, right? Meta existing is without a doubt a net negative for mankind.

[scrollaway]

What you’re suggesting does not at all require a lot of money.

[scoreandmore]

I met a youngster on Boca del Toro island in Panama a decade or so ago. I was about to be fired from my FAANG job so I used up years and years of vacation for one big trip before I was let go. We hung out for a few days while I was there (I don’t recommend the place at all btw). He cashed out from early twitter and was setting up surf schools all of the world. All he did was travel, surf, drink, and fuck. I’m still angry that laughed at all the dumb startups in the late 2000s instead of joining them. But this guy did what you’re suggesting, and I think there are many more unknown techbros who did it too.

[beala]

Setting up an international chain of surf schools actually sounds quite ambitious and stressful, though.

[eastbound]

And let others govern the world?

[sabedevops]

I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

[aleph_minus_one]

> Also, do you have a better way to spend that money?

Yes, I do.

I am aware of some quite deep scientific results that would have a deep impact (and thus likely bring a lot of business value) if these were applied in practice.

[croes]

There are some problems in the world that Meta could help fixing with that money.

[ponector]

250M is not that much to solve a global problem, just take a look at bill gates fund.

Still huge amount of money which can improve life of millions.

[aswanson]

Given history of the guy at the helm, most likely won't.

[achenet]

downsize Facebook back to like a couple thousand people max, use the resulting savings to retire and start your own AI instead of doing the whole shadow artist "I'll hire John Carmack/top AI researcher to work for me because deep down I can't believe I'd ever be as good as them and my ego is too afraid to look foolish so I won't even try even if deep down that's what I want more than being a capricious billionaire"?

or am I just projecting my beliefs onto Mark Zuckerberg here?

[hattmall]

Retire? Anyone with more than about 10-20 million that continues to work has some sort of pathology that leaves them unsatisfied. Normal people rarely even get to that level because they are too busy enjoying life. Anyone making billions has some serious issues that they are likely stuck with because hubris won't let them seek meaningful help.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Normal people rarely even get to that level because they are too busy enjoying life.

And that's why these "normal people" don't become insanely rich.

(just to be clear: the reverse direction does not hold: just a tiny fraction of such workaholics will become insanely rich).

[Infinity315]

It might make more sense to think of in terms of expected value. Whilst the probability may be low, the payoff is probably many times the $250M if their startup becomes successful.

[darepublic]

You can only one roll in the crapshoot of life though.

[gsf_emergency_2]

It's strange that Zuck didn't just buy options on that guy? (Or did he? Would love to see the terms.)

Zuck's advantage over Sir Isaac (Newton) is that the market for top AI researchers is much more volatile than in South Sea tradeables pre-bubble burst?

Either that or 250M is cheap for cognitive behavior therapy

[cweld510]

What matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.

[Hamuko]

In this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.

[exasperaited]

This is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble.

But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him.

This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.

[tracerbulletx]

Professional athletes get paid on that scale, CEOs get paid on that scale. A top researcher in a burgeoning technology should get paid that much. Because bubbles dont mean every company fails, it means most of them do and the winner takes all, and if someone thinks hiring this guy will make them the winner than it's not remotely unusual.

[bbor]

I'm not a conspiracy person, but it's hard not to believe that some cruel god sent us crypto just a few years before we accidentally achieved AGI just to mess with us. So many people are confident that AGI is impossible and LLMs are a passing fad based to a large degree on the idea that SV isn't trustworthy -- I'd probably be there too, if I wasn't in the field myself. It's a hard pattern not to recognize, even if n~=2.5 at most!

I hope for all of our sake's that you're right. I feel confident that you're not :(

[ath3nd]

Dude, LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve. From that to AGI or Zuck's "superintelligence" is just light years... LLMs are a dead end for "intelligence".

We are talking about the promises of the same crop of people who brought you full Autopilot on Tesla (still waiting since 2019 when it was supposed to happen), or the Boring Tunnel, the Metaverse, and their latest products are an office suite and "study mode".

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021949/openai-goes-fo...

https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-study-mode/

This is EXACTLY the same as NFTs, Crypto, Web3, Mars. Some gurus and thought leaders talk big talk while taking gullible investors' money and hope nobody asks them how they plan to turn in a profit.

My edgy prediction is that blunder after blunder (Metaverse, LLAMA, the enshittification of whatsapp, instagram losing heavily to tiktok and facebook having mostly dead accounts) and now giving 250M in vapor-money to youngsters, this is Meta's last stab in the dark before they finally get exposed for how irrelevant they are. Then no amount of groveling to Trump or MMA would be able to save the Zuck from being seen for what he really is: an irrelevant morally bankrupt douche (I could say the same about Elon as well) just trying out random stuff and talking big.

[Eisenstein]

"LLMs are a very sophisticated autocomplete with a few tricks down their sleeve."

"Nuclear power plants are a very sophisticated steam generator with a few tricks down their sleeve."

These things are both just as true and just as informative.

[hattmall]

Nuclear is actually a great example. It's a major scientific accomplishment but pretty much the least cost effective method of energy generation. Nuclear allowed us to generate huge amounts of energy to waste on whatever we like when the real focus should be on massively decreasing energy demands. But of course that doesn't make anyone money.

[Eisenstein]

Decreasing energy demands isn't going to happen though, and energy should not be thought of as a profit generator. You can spend all your effort trying to do something that isn't going to happen without forcing people to do it, and you can lament that public needs don't make profits, or you can deal with the reality of the situation and accept that things aren't ideal.

[tiagod]

Please prove that human brains don't work as a very sophisticated autocomplete.

[hoppp]

When proving you should to prove that they are similar and not that they are dissimilar.

[vpShane]

Let me meditate on that.

[ath3nd]

Please use an LLM and prove it yourself. Then use an LLM and prove the opposite. That's how much weight your "proofs" have.

In fact, buy a premium subscription to all the LLMs out there (yes, even LLAMA) and have them write the proof using the scientific method, and submit the papers to me via a carrier pigeon.

[ben_w]

Other than the rockets and Starlink, I do not trust anything from Musk. Mainly because while everyone whose opinion I trust about rockets says "LGTM", everyone whose opinion I trust on all the other things he does says as per https://xkcd.com/2030/

I don't trust Zuckerberg. Bad vibes about everything Facebook ever since I went to one of their developer conferences in London a bit over a decade ago, only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't even pay for ads on their system, given the ads I see think I want dick pills and boob surgery, and are trying to get me to give up a citizenship I never had in the first place while relocating to a place I've actually left. Sometimes they're in languages I don't speak.

And while I can't say that I have any negative vibes from Altman, I've learned to trust all the people who do say he's a wrong 'un, as they were right about a few other big names before him.

And I wouldn't invest in any of the companies making LLMs, because I think the whole "no moat" argument is being shown to be plausible by way of how close behind all the open models are.

But LLMs are, despite all that, obviously useful even if you see them as only autocomplete. They're obviously useful even if you think they're just a blurry JPEG of the internet. They're obviously useful even if they're never going to meaningfully improve.

LLMs are not like NFTs. Might be like Mars, though.

[bbor]

Yeah... Just stay on your toes, I guess. Be open to being wrong, for the sake of you and those around you.

FWIW, "Elon Musk lies" is not a great counterpoint to an overwhelming scientific consensus.

[ath3nd]

Well, if LLMs were the next coming of Christ, where is the impact of them on open source?

Everyone claims they are awesome and super powerful in their own toy projects or in their private source. Where is the actual impact of LLMs superior power on OSS?

I can tell you:

We are drowning in slop.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/open-source-project-...

I repeat again: a bunch of words strung randomly together is not thought.

[kevinventullo]

Tesla self-driving aside, have you ridden in a Waymo? It’s actually pretty magical.

[jfrbfbreudh]

dude, computers are just rocks that we coerced into adding 1’s and 0’s. when are people finally going to wake up?

[mensetmanusman]

Bubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.

[sebtron]

Woah, a whopping 0.5%. That's like working 12 minutes more every week. I waste much more time every day because of how slow and sluggish Windows 11 is.

[saagarjha]

0.5% across all the world's population would be a significant achievement. The fact that you spend this much time in Windows 11 is actually a crime against humanity.

[achenet]

time for another case against Microsoft?

They got off against monopoly charges, how will they handle the ol' "ads in the Start Menu is a crime against humanity on par with genocide"?

Probably like the time Meta handled a genocide in Mynammar: without any serious consequences :DD https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[ben_w]

0.5% of USD 100 trillion per year, with a usual accounting I've seen being that you can count that boost for the next 20 years, is worth 0.5% * $100T/year * 20 years = USD 10 trillion.

Now, we don't have a single investor making this investment nor getting the reward for the investment, but that's the kind of overall shape of the reasoning behind why people are willing to invest so much in AI.

[gizajob]

It would be trivial for most of Europe to improve productivity by 0.5% or even 5% but they’re too busy drinking nice wine outside a cafe in the sunshine most of the day.

[HWR_14]

There is no guarantee that Meta or OpenAI would capture that increase in productivity as opposed to open models or otherwise driving the profits on the AI itself to zero.

[wyre]

As LLM's get smarter and more capable on smaller and smaller computers Anthropic, Google, Grok, OpenAI, and Meta (is there an acronym, like FAANG, for the giant AI companies? MOGGA? GOMAG?) will have to get creative with profit-drivers, when consumers will have a very capable LLM built-in to their computing device(s), and it can easily be worth the cost to a business to invest in the computing power to provide on-device LLM's to their workers.

[hattmall]

There's no doubt the primary use for "AI" will be generating rage inducing engagement bait to squeeze a few more seconds of advertising into our days.

[kevinmchugh]

MAGOG, certainly.

[exasperaited]

Oof. Rather on-the-nose.

[hoppp]

GAYMAN (Google, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix)

[exasperaited]

If you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble.

I have two questions about this, really:

- is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO?

- are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires?

That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup?

The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas.

The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them.

"This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come.

For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal.

But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money.

And that could burst your bubble.

[joyeuse6701]

Sure, though the barrier is quite high to fake it.

[wisemang]

Depends on who exactly you’re trying to convince.

[throwdbaaway]

> The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates.

You started to sound like Dario, who likes to accuse others as intellectually dishonest and unserious. Anyway, perhaps the strict wage structure of Anthropic will be its downfall in this crazy bubble?

[exasperaited]

I am accusing no one individually or particularly. I am observing that the problem is that within a bubble, people collectively become increasingly unserious and less intellectually honest as their appetite for risk increases with their desire to get a slice of the action. Indeed, it gets worse as people begin to think it might not last forever.

The same thing happened in the dotcom era, the same thing happened in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis. Every single bubble displays these characteristics.

[hackable_sand]

Woo

Nightmare Future!

[bloodyplonker22]

I agree on all points. However, if he already had several millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

[ceejayoz]

I’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.

[s-lambert]

And it's only temporary too, he can work for Meta for a few years and then do whatever he wants for the rest of his life.

[libraryatnight]

I weep for humanity.

[ceejayoz]

People say that sort of thing when it’s a hypothetical. It’s a little different when a quarter billion dollars is actually on offer.

Hitmen get what, $5-50k? And that’s for murder.

[latentsea]

I mean it's not bad when you think about it in terms of an hourly rate.

[fc417fc802]

I think you're forgetting to factor in the tail risks when calculating the rate. In fact I doubt they still qualify as "tail" under those circumstances. There's a fairly decent chance the retirement plan ends up being facing a firing squad.

[krainboltgreene]

Yeah man, that’s not fucking good.

[achenet]

no it's capitalism at it's finest.

We get less violent because AI research pays more than murder, so more people focus on being good AI researchers than good killers, and the world is happier for it.

[libraryatnight]

You need help

[ceejayoz]

Sure. $250M buys a lot of help.

Zuck can take the glory if he wants. Glory doesn’t pay my bills.

[arcanemachiner]

Everyone has a price.

Mine is a hell of a lot lower than $250M, and I would bet half of that that yours is too.

[ath3nd]

No amount of money (or torture) can make me work for Meta, Palantir or Amazon.

[ben_w]

Mmm.

Threats of violence might get me to work for any of them; and I don't think I hate Amazon enough to do more than just not use it; but if I were somehow important enough to get a call from Zuckerberg, my answer would be "Meta delanda est", no matter how many digits or how cash-based the proposed offer was.

But I'm not important enough to be noticed, let alone called.

[aswanson]

How do you rank the evil list? For me, Palantir is an easy #1.

[trevorhinesley]

He said he’d forego glory, not values.

[deadbabe]

For $250M I’d still forego all kinds of values.

[ihsw]

That $250M is (societally) better off going to him than being spent on whatever the hell Meta was going to otherwise spend it on.

[overfeed]

> Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?

Meta will have more AI-compute than he ever hoped to get at his - and most other - startups.

[Rover222]

This is such a weird sentiment to me, comparing taking one of the highest paying corporate jobs in the history of humanity to bowing down to some dictator.

[zurfer]

He probably heard the memes, didn't really want to work for Meta and said a "ridiculous" high number and Meta was like: we can do that.

[tom_m]

[flagged]

[tomhow]

Please don't post shallow dismissals... - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's fine to think that we're in a bubble and to post a comment explaining your thoughts about it. But a comment like this is a low-effort, drive-by shoot-down of a comment that took at least a bit of thought and effort, and that's exactly what we don't want on HN.

[trhway]

Various BigCo-s have been reporting good results recently and highlighted significant AI role in that. That may be a BS of course, yet even if it is half-true we're talking about tens/hundreds of billions of revenues. With 10x multiple it supports a trillion like generic valuation of AI in business right now.

[nerevarthelame]

Zuckerberg had a lot to say about AI in his part of Meta's Q2 earnings statement, but the follow-up earnings call [0] revealed the rather limited scope of AI in their ad business so far:

>"The first is enabling business AIs within message threads ... We’re expanding business AIs to more businesses in Mexico and the Philippines. And we expect to broaden availability later this year as we keep refining the product."

>"The second area of business AI development is within ads ... We’re currently testing this with a small number of businesses across Feed and Reels on Facebook and Instagram as well as Instagram Stories."

>"And then the final area that we are exploring is business AIs on business websites to help better support businesses across all platforms ... and we’re starting to test that with a few businesses in the US."

So it's just very small scale tests so far - not the sort of thing that would have any measurable impact on their revenue.

[0]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2...

[sameermanek]

How much has the whole industry invested in AI vs how much revenue has AI generated in total?

[naveen99]

Molmo caught my eye also a while ago.

[andyjensen]

Same except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree

[mizzao]

It's also possible, based on what happens to those who win the lottery, that his life could become a lot harder. It's not great to have the fact that you're making $2M a week plastered all over the Internet.