Good for those involved being offered such packages, but it really does raise the question of what exactly those offering them are so afraid of.
For example, Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style competitor, but it's hard to see how such a thing could emerge from the current social media landscape.
It has nothing to do with Meta's social media business. Zuckerberg, like many other top tech executives, has concluded AGI/ASI is in striking distance. If he could somehow win the race, he becomes god (or so he thinks, anyway). And from the perspective of a man whose idol is Julius Caesar, what wouldn't you spend for that chance?
This seems like it lands in the "most uncharitable" side of the "guess why someone is doing something I don't understand" spectrum. My razors tell me this is usually not the most plausible answer.
They just want the best, and they’re afraid of having second rates, B-players, etc., causing a bozo explosion. That seems like all the motivation that’s needed.
Why why would they need fears about a quasi-facebook chatbot?
Coming from Meta, I have to wonder if the reason for this isn't more down to Zuck's ego and history. He seems to have somewhat lost interest in FaceBook, and was previously all-in on the Metaverse as the next big thing, which has failed to take off as a concept, and now wants to go all-in on "super-intelligence" (seems to lack ambition - why not "super-duper extra special intelligence"?) with his new vision being smart glasses as the universal AI interface. He can't seem to get past the notion that people want to wear tech on their head and live in augmented reality.
Anyhow, with the Metaverse as a flop, and apparently having self-assessed Meta's current LLM efforts as unsatisfactory, it seems Zuck may want to rescue his reputation by throwing money at it to try to make his next big gamble a winner. It seems a bit irrational given that other companies, and countries, have built SOTA LLMs without needing to throw NBA/NFL/rockstar money around.
This rings true. Zuck wants to go down in the history books like Jobs—as a visionary who introduced technology that changed the world.
He's not there yet, and he knows it. Jobs gave us GUIs and smartphones. Facebook is not even in the same universe, and Instagram is just something he bought. He went all in on the metaverse, but the technology still needs at least 10-15 years to fully bake. In the meantime, there's AGI/super-intelligence. He needs to beat Sam Altman.
The sad thing is, even if he does beat Sam to AGI, Sam will still probably get the credit as the visionary.
Xerox created the GUI, and much of modern computing, but Jobs/Apple certainly deserve credit for the smartphone.
Before the iPhone the phone market was primarily "feature phones" - flip phones with a keyboard and a few built-in JavaScript apps. The Blackberry wasn't much different - just a better keyboard with a focus on messaging/business use.
The iPhone was quite radical - masterfully presented as an iPod, phone, and internet communications device, before revealing that they were all capabilities of the same device.
The effect on the phone market was immediate, and turned the market upside down. It was basically the end of Nokia who had been dominant up to that point, and caused everyone else to scrap current plans and go back to the drawing board, realizing that this new pocket-computer smartphone concept, with it's large touch screen interface was obviously the future.
The smartphone is nothing more than a merge of a traditional cell phone (what we now call "feature phone") and a PDA. Such a merge would happen sooner or later, either with PDAs acquiring the ability to also act as cell phones, or with cell phones gaining the ability to also act as PDAs. Apple might have accelerated that change, but it was inevitable.
I don't think that framing really gives enough credit to how novel the iPhone was, and how it shook up the market when it was introduced.
Yes, PDAs had already been a thing for a long time (Psion Organizer), and Apple themselves had experimented with this category too with the Newton, before the Palm Pilot then became so dominant.
What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box. The large touch screen, with gesture-based UI, was also quite novel, and a large part of what made it successful and generic.
It's easy to look in the rear view mirror and say that most inventions/innovations were inevitable and just a product of their times, but the iPhone was quite shocking when first launched and did shake up the industry - nobody was expecting it, or expecting how popular such a device would be. Steve Ballmer famously laughed at the iPhone after it's launch and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).. and then of course went on to try unsuccessfully to copy it.
> What was novel about the smart phone - really it's defining characteristic, was it wasn't a primarily single purpose device like a PDA, or phone, or MP-3 player/iPod, or camera, or handheld web browser, but rather a universal hand held computer/communications device, and one whose functionality was not limited to what you got out of the box.
I used a Palm PDA back in the pre-iPhone days. Its functionality was not "limited to what you got out of the box", you could install applications on it. I have fond memories of exchanging Palm applications with my friends through its infrared port. I used it as a PDA, MP3 player, camera, to play games, and even as a handheld web browser (it didn't come with a web browser, it was one of the applications I installed), using a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone for the network access. The only thing it couldn't do, was making phone calls; for that, I used that cell phone on my other pocket. That's the defining characteristic of a smartphone: being a phone which can do all the things a PDA could already do.
> and questioned who would want it, given the high cost and lack of a keyboard (a feature, not a deficit!).
That Palm PDA also lacked a keyboard. It was designed to be used without a keyboard, and worked pretty well, with either the stylus or the on-screen keyboard (which was usable even without the stylus). So it was not a given that the lack of a keyboard would be a deficit.
You're completely discounting quality of execution, which in this case is everything. It's the whole ballgame.
I had friends who were Palm Treo die-hards, and they dropped them unceremoniously in 2008 when they used an iPhone for the first time. They were already used to carrying around a phone that could do email and access the internet. But the qualitative jump to the iPhone was so big that it upended the industry and became quite literally the most successful consumer product of all time. If you can't see how that's different from Palm, I don't know what to tell you.
> You're completely discounting quality of execution, which in this case is everything. It's the whole ballgame.
Yes, the iPhone excelled on so many levels, from the hardware level sleek design, screen (game changer really - high resolution color, with multi-point touch support), camera, but also all of the individual functionalities. This wasn't an incremental advance or a case of adding one or two new capabilities to what a Palm could do - this was next-level across the board.
The design of iOS, including the gesture/touch based UI, and level of performance was also key, and it took Android a LONG time to catch up. Microsoft made a misguided attempt with Windows Phone, and others like Nokia and Palm were just left in the dust. We did get Qt from Nokia as a side effect, which was a plus!
That just shows you how warped the minds of the general public are. They fail to realize the only thing Jobs did was know the right people then take all the credit…
This is how (checks notes) everything has always worked.
In a large project such as introducing the first GUI for general use, you can't do everything yourself. If you're within a company, you hire people. You take inspiration from the outside. It's a team effort, and not the result of a lone genius.
That does not diminish what Jobs did. The Mac and the Lisa were underway before the Xerox PARC visit. The idea of mixed graphics and text were already out there as an ideal—it's pretty obvious if you think about it. Engelbart's demo was already legendary.
But as we all know, it's one thing for a technology to exist in a research lab, and quite another for it to be adopted by millions of people. That's where Jobs was actually exceptional. He was able to manage these massive projects with just the right compromises to take great technology and turn it into great products.
Lisa attracted a lot of interest, but was outrageously expensive (~$50K in 2025 dollars) as well as being slow. The Mac in its final form is best regarded as a cheaper performant Lisa.
1. Neither the Lisa nor Mac "copied" the Alto. They took inspiration, but again, the Lisa project began before the team ever visited Xerox. These ideas were in the air in SV, but no one had figured out how to commercialize it. Sort of like conversational UI circa 2015.
2. The Mac was more than a warmed-over Lisa. If you use both, you'll see how much more polished and complete the Mac is.
3. The Mac was a product where the price point really mattered, and was part of the product identity. You can't have "the computer for the rest of us" at the Lisa's price point. Getting that retail price down required a ton of ingenious software and hardware engineering, which was driven forward relentlessly by Jobs.
Lmao right!? Dude stole all that from Xerox and MS came out with palm pilots early 2000s then you had black berry. Amazing how many people think CEOs actually did the work they get credit for when they almost virtually all were in the right spot with the right people. Notice none of them can reproduce or start another ultra successful startup… Zuckerberg is a perfect example of one hit wonder and he wasn’t even the first to create social sites.. You had MySpace and a ton of others..
Palm Pilots and Blackberrys existed before the iPhone, so why don't they exist anymore? Why are their founders historical side notes?
Because they didn't usher in the smartphone revolution. They just weren't good enough for the mass market. Palm was a great early start, but so was Apple's Newton.
So yes, the idea of a smartphone and some of the components existed before the iPhone, but nothing was "stolen." Jobs was the one who first crystalized the smartphone as we know it now. And yes, he used a team, because CEOs don't literally do all of the work of the company.
Zuckerberg is one of the reasons I think AI is a bubble and overhyped. He lacks vision. Remember when they renamed the company Meta and the metaverse was the whole future of the company?
This is the same thing. It is the new shiny tech demo that is really cool. And technically works really, really well and has some real uses, but that doesn’t make a multi billion dollar business.
Facebook is a sewer (like all of internet to some extent); Instagram is a teenage depression-inducing drug; and Whatsapp is sufficiently important that it can't be monetized to destruction.
I'm surprised Meta is valued like Google, and not like HP or some other has-been, given that it's running on the spamming crummy ads towards lonely boomers and divorced millenials.
The only bright-spot is their AI lab with Yann and the PyTorch team.
I don't think he gave up on the metaverse. Isn't AR glasses a stepping stone towards that? Or rather LLM voice assistant a stepping stone towards AR glasses? And the metaverse being a stepping stone towards a holodeck?
I mean I'm with you, I think these things are pretty far away and are going to cost a lot of money to make and require a lot of failure in the mean time. But then again, it looks like they spent ~$18bn on Reality Labs last year. So if he was funding it all on his own dime, his current $260bn of wealth would give him a good 14 years runway if we ignore interest. It would be effectively indefinite if he earns about a 5% interest on that money.
I guess I'm just trying to say, it's hard to think about these things when we're talking about such scales of wealth. I mean at those scales, I'm pretty sure the money is meaningless, that money (and the ability to throw it around) is more a proxy for ego.
The Metaverse was more about virtual reality than AR .. a virtual place where remote teams would work and business meetings be held etc, and as such seems to be a complete flop. This is just not how remote teams want to work. Superior VR googles are of course used for gaming too.
AR seems to be mostly a solution, or technology, looking for a problem. It's a bit like envisioning a future full of flying cars, or humanoid robots walking among us, or even wired picture phones (World Fair 1964). Just because you can, doesn't mean you will have "product market fit" and that people will find a use or want to use what you have built.
Maybe AR will find niche professional or entertainment uses (cf Segway) - could imagine using them in a museum or on a guided tourist tour, perhaps.
It's funny that Zuck as creator of FaceBook, seems to misjudge human nature so badly in the case of Metaverse or mass-adoption smart glasses AR. It seems he maybe just got lucky that his college dating app grew into something much larger and more successful, although he does seem quite competent as a CEO, just not as the serial entrepreneur he seems to fancy himself as.
Just like in football, buying all the best players pretty much guarantees failure as egos and personal styles clash and take precedence over team achievement. The only reasons one would do that are fear, vanity, and stupidity, and those have to be more important than getting value for the extraordinary amounts of money invested.
The only case where this may have made sense - but more for an individual rather than a team - is Google's aqui-rehire of Noam Shazeer for $1B. He was the original creator of the transformer architecture, had made a number of architectural improvements while at Character.ai, and thus had a track record of being able to wring performance out of it, which at Google-scale may be worth that kind of money.
Noam was already one of Google's top AI researchers and a personal friend of Jeff Dean (head of Google AI, at least in title). He worked on some of the early (~2002) search systems at Google and patented some of their most powerful technoloigies at the time- which were critical in making Google Search a product that was popular, and highly profitable.
First rate A-players are beyond petty ego clashes, practically by definition… otherwise they wouldn’t be considered so highly (and thus fall into the bozo category).
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. The talent pool is extremely small and the companies want the absolute best.
It is the same thing in sports as well. There will only ever be one Michael Jordan one Lionel Messi one Tiger Woods one Magnus Carlsen. And they are paid a lot because they are worth it.
>> Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style competitor
Meta moved on from facebook a while back.It has been years since I last logged into facebook and hardly anybody I know actually post anything there. Its a relic of the past.
> Here is the uncomfortable truth. Only a small group of people are capable of operating at an elite level. […] It is the same thing in sports as well.
It’s not just uncomfortable but might not be true at all. Sports is practically the opposite type of skills: easy to measure, known rules, enormous amount of repetition. Research is unknown. A researcher that guarantees result is not doing research. (Coincidentally, the increasing rewards in academia for incrementalist result driven work is a big factor in the declining overall quality, imo.)
I think what’s happening is kind of what happened in Wall Street. Those with a few documented successes got disproportionately more business based to a large part on initial conditions and timing.
Not to take away from AI researchers specifically, I’m sure they’re a smart bunch. But I see no reason to think they stand out against other academic fields.
Occam’s razor says it’s panic in the C-suites and they perceive it as an existential race. It’s not important whether it actually is, but rather that’s how they feel. And they have such enormous amount of cash that they’re willing to play many risky bets at the same time. One of them being to hire/poach the hottest names.
Hot fucking take - but if these 100 (or whatever small number is being thrown around these days) elite researchers disappeared overnight, the world would go on and little of it would be noticed. New people in the field would catch up, and things would be up to speed quick enough.
It is not a question of exquisitely rare intellect, but rather the opportunity and funding/resources to prosper.
Hmmmm, I think only assuming those 100 have not been accurately identified. In pretty much all fields I am familiar with, the ability distribution seems to approximate a power law near the top: the gap between the best and the 20th best can be absolutely gigantic.
(And while there are certainly those who could have been the best who did not have the opportunity to succeed, or just didn't actually want to pursue it, I think usually this is way at the edges, i.e. removing the top would not make room for these people, because they're probably not even on anyone's radar at all, like the 'Einstein toiling in a field')
I think sports is even more susceptible to the influence of capital.
Athletes need the following:
- talent/potential
- ability (talent that has been realized)
- work ethic
- luck (could be something as simple as avoiding injuries, supportive family / friends / guardians, etc.)
That will usually get you on the radar. You'll be identified by your coach, talent agents, etc.
Once you cross a certain threshold, usually by the time you've been picked out by talent agents / joined a youth academy, and signed for a sports club with the financial means, you get access to a whole infrastructure that has one goal, and one goal only: To unlock your full potential, and make you the best athlete you can be.
And it is not that unsimilar to how AI researchers are brought up. If you look at pretty much any of the top AI talent, they have the following pedigree:
Very gifted HS students that went to feeder schools / academies, and / or participated in some STEM Olympiad -> Prestigious universities or some top ranking schools in their field -> Well-funded and prestigious research group -> top internships and post-grad employment (or they dropped out to join/found a startup)
You could be the smartest researcher in the world, but if you're stuck at some dinky school with zero budget, and can't (or don't get the change to) relocate, you're going to be stuck at the B/C/D-league.
I think it would be about the same, to be honest. There is always someone who is 90% as good as Stephen Curry and we'll rescale our expectations to match.
While I don’t doubt that these people have great experience and skills what they really have that others don’t is connections and the ability to market themselves well.
All you need is to publish a couple of right papers and/or significantly contribute to a couple of right projects. If you have brains for that you’ll be noticed.
For example, Meta seem to be spending so much so they don't later have to fight a war against an external Facebook-as-chatbot style competitor, but it's hard to see how such a thing could emerge from the current social media landscape.