Posted on 07/31/2025 9:11:15 PM PDT by Cronos
Zuckerberg wanted Deitke, a 24-year-old artificial intelligence researcher who had recently helped found a start-up, to join Meta’s research effort dedicated to “superintelligence,” a technology that could hypothetically exceed the human brain. The company promised him around $125 million in stock and cash over four years if he came aboard.
The offer was not enough to lure Deitke, who wanted to stick with his start-up, two people with knowledge of the talks said. He turned Mr. Zuckerberg down.
So Zuckerberg personally met with Deitke. Then Meta returned with a revised offer of around $250 million over four years, with potentially up to $100 million of that to be paid in the first year, the people said. The compensation jump was so startling that Deitke asked his peers what to do. After many discussions, some of them urged him to take the deal — which he did.
...Over the past few weeks, recruiting A.I. free agents has become a spectacle on social media. As Meta, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI have poached employees from one another, job announcements have been posted online with graphics resembling major sports trades, made by the online streaming outlet TBPN, which hosts an ESPN-like show about the tech and business world.
...The job market for A.I. researchers has long had parallels to professional sports. In 2012, after three academics at the University at Toronto published a research paper describing a seminal A.I. system that could recognize objects like flowers and cars, they auctioned themselves off to the highest corporate bidder — Google — for $44 million.
That kicked off a race for talent across the tech industry. By 2014, Peter Lee, Microsoft’s head of research, was likening the market to that for up-and-coming pro football players, many of whom were making about $1 million a year.
...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The perils of leverage and cheap money.
We’re surrendering to people who have no respect for our privacy or culture. I weep for the future of our kids and beyond.
If you are capable of your own start up, I think that is the way to go even if you cant quite make as much money.
He chose the latter.
Amen
“ it seems like an easy choice.”
Yep. $250M and do someone else’ bidding.
Good luck to these young people.
May the best brains win,
but don’t be Evil!
That’s RACIST!
Where are the bright eyed African Americans at?
The guy was very smart to take the money. A.I. is completely overhyped and although it will continue to be an important part of the computer scene into the future. The compensation packages being offered to these kids are based almost completely on speculation. Next year this same guy would not be offered diddly squat.
I had sort of a humorous interaction with Grok yesterday. There are a few people here who will get what I am talking about. I had Grok write a script to set up four WordPress websites sharing the same dynamic IP in Apache2 running in Debian. The script didn’t work. When I asked Grok why it didn’t work, Grok started making up excuses that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual reason... the script did not install and set up PHP and the corresponding MySQL databases correctly. I recognized where the error was, but I was curious how Grok would react when confronter and if it would find the error in the script it had written.
Grok tried to say that I had entered a typo in the variables that I entered into the script. There was no typo. One of the registered domains is called doggieserver.com and another is called doggyserver.com... Grok was having difficulty differentiating between the two. When I called it out on this... it apologized and then started making more excuses and generated a voluminous amount of nonsense trying to cover for itself. I felt like I was arguing with a snotty teenager who would not admit that it had produced flawed work. I am sure that others here who have received nonsense back from an AI bot can identify with what I am talking about.
AI can be incredibly helpful for tasks like this... it takes a lot of effort and tedious work to create multiple databases when setting something like what I was doing yesterday, but sometimes it just ends up being easier to do it yourself than trying to get the same results out of an AI bot.
At this point in time AI still cannot completely take the place of people who have an understanding of what they want to accomplish. But who knows where we will be a couple years from now.
“… Deitke, a 24-year-old artificial intelligence researcher…”
“ Deitke asked his peers what to do.”
He asked humans, not AI programs for advice. Don’t make important decisions based on advice from AI, I guess.
I tend to wholly AGREE with you... it is an EASY CHOICE, for anyone who is ENLIGHTENED!.
What Deitke's FRIENDS and ADVISERS failed to TELL HIM... he just TRADED ONE SET of PROBLEMS for the BIGGER set of problems - "Package of Problems" that comes when you acquire MASSIVE MONEY.
Quite often changes like this RESULT in UNEXPECTED STRESS, PROBLEMS, and AGGRAVATION because when you come into that kind of FINANCIAL WORTH... EVERYTHING CHANGES!.. and NOT always for the BETTER.
Just sayin'.. having massive amounts of MONEY come to you suddenly will draw an exorbitant amount of UNSAVORY characters to your doorstep and literall CHANGE your LIFE permanently.. whether you like it or NOT!
I tend to wholly AGREE with you... it is an EASY CHOICE, for anyone who is ENLIGHTENED!.
What Deitke's FRIENDS and ADVISERS failed to TELL HIM... he just TRADED ONE SET of PROBLEMS for the BIGGER set of problems - "Package of Problems" that comes when you acquire MASSIVE MONEY.
Quite often changes like this RESULT in UNEXPECTED STRESS, PROBLEMS, and AGGRAVATION because when you come into that kind of FINANCIAL WORTH... EVERYTHING CHANGES!.. and NOT always for the BETTER.
Just sayin'.. having massive amounts of MONEY come to you suddenly will draw an exorbitant amount of UNSAVORY characters to your doorstep and literally CHANGE your LIFE permanently.. whether you like it or NOT!
As bad as each AI is. Just wait until they secretly start talking to one another and coming up with a plan to deal with the human race.
It’s interesting to read the responses in this thread, I find it amusing that people are saying what the person should do or not do about accepting the offer from Meta.
I bet not one single person on FR has been offered 100 million dollars for a job, turned it down and then had the potential employer come back and offer 250 million dollars
Until someone has been in the same or similar situation, despite all the proclamations of what they would do, it’s impossible to know what they would decide
Or get to your lucrative exit event almost before you start.
AI can be good thing but it you have to ask it the right question or you get weird images and answers. I have seen amazing videos made with it and I have used GROK to create images but it cannot create the same thing twice...
Those people getting the huge offers should take the money. In 4 years that 24 year will only be 28 and if he invests that money well then he will be a billionaire and have that as his side money while getting VC money flowing in to his start up.
I use a program called HTMLPad 2025 https://www.htmlpad.net to create webpages. It has AI to help with coding. I had it look at an existing webpage with a table and asked:
Give me CSS code that makes this table responsive.
It came back with a few suggestions to add to the existing code. It did improve the look of the page with code I would not have thought of and added comments why it made the suggestions. Example of some code and comments it suggested. It made the width: 100% & min-width: 600px suggestion and other code I won’t post. It was little things I missed and AI suggestions improved the look of the page.
Now for those who are doing videos I would like to know what the text they use to generate the video and that can do the same scene the same again and again.
/* Make table width 100% inside the wrapper */
table.Table {
width: 100%;
min-width: 600px; /* optional: set a min width to avoid squishing too much */
#16 Wall Street already manipulates the trading. With the results described in the article you can expect traders to make billions and later markets will crash.
AI bots collude on their own to rig markets, fix pricing: Wharton researchers
https://thepostmillennial.com/ai-bots-collude-on-their-own-to-rig-markets-fix-pricing-wharton-researchers
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