Just glancing through the article, it seems like this person is a doctor of philosophy (hardly a "kid") and their doctorate is literally in the exact thing that everyone is throwing gobs and gobs of cash at. And I guess Meta (et al) sense that literal empires are at stake here, so this is probably just how much money that's worth to them.
Media has this strange need for fully-grown responsible adults to be thought of as children. Not only for the amazing stories of "this (mid-30s career professional) kid did something", but also helpful to try and shirk responsibility.
Thinking about attempts to frame SBF as a wee smol bean kid in over his head while actively committing fraud.
Taking immediately available cash instead of finishing a PhD is almost always a good economic decision (we'll leave aside the fact that a PhD is almost always a disastrously bad economic decision).
For almost every Doctorate except for a few who really want to become postdocs or somehow win the tenure lottery, there is a generally an economic disincentive to completing it.
The 250:1 substitution doesn't work because breakthrough AI research follows power law distributions where top researchers produce orders of magnitude more value through novel insights that can't be replicated by simply adding more average contributors.
