Zuckerberg deserves a mountain of critisism for everything he has done, but one thing I'll give him is that he doesn't hesitate to get out his checkbook and pay absurd amounts of money for engineering talent.
Back when Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and other big tech companies signed illegal anti-poaching agreements Zuck said no, I'll pay whatever it takes to attract the best talent, no matter where they work.
Facebook/Meta has consistently set the bar for engineering salaries across the industry, and Google and the rest are forced to match it.
Now every AI company is paying millions of dollars for regular engineers just because Zuck is out there throwing out wads of cash from the roof.
When it comes to salaries the man simply does not care about standards and precedents, and I love that.
Yep. And a company like Meta or OpenAI paying massive sums is a good thing for workers, even if you don't work there. Other companies have more incentive to pay their workers more or they'll go elsewhere.
When employees are underpaid (see Windsurf), HN be like: investors and C-suites take all the gains, off with their heads!
When employees are generously (and proactively) compensated for the financial milestones of the company, HN be like: it’s a bubble, it’s irresponsible, investors are fools, off with their heads!
I applaude OpenAI and its investors for approving these moves. Even if it’s a bubble, sharing some of it with employees “before it bursts” is a noble action. I worked in startups where management kept employees in complete illiquidity until full wipeout inevitably happened, while many senior folks were able to take some off the table in targeted secondary transactions.
I really dislike these types of comments as they don't really contribute to the conversation. Beyond generally going against HN's rules, they don't really highlight anything meaningful or represent an actual cognitive dissonance.
Forums are composed of diverse sets of opinions and perspectives. When you get a lot of opinions together, opinions change - some of which can be explained simply by randomness.
Perhaps, it's not strictly against the letters of the guidelines - but I've always found these types of comments against the spirit of the guidelines. I'd largely say they go against the spirt of a few rules, especially: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes."
They're low effort, generic, populous comments that do little to contribute to the discussion.
I don't often comment on HN in either of these cases but... I think aspects of both things are true.
There is a serious AI bubble right now and also it is the norm in the startup/VC world to fuck over regular employees.
I'm happy for any normal people who got 1.5M here. But even in this case I believe this has more to do with weird poaching politics (and hype building) than it does being legitimately altruistic.
Both of these scenarios could be framed as “evidence of high variance”. Given that human societies as all levels of scale generally thrive under low-variance scenarios, it’s not surprising to see the general category of “high-variance” scenarios critiqued by the community.
You realize of course that you are also on HN and thus this apparent dichotomous behaviour applies to you as well? I imagine you have some reason for why it doesn't and I think you'll find that it can just as easily apply to everyone else.
While I clearly cannot control who upvotes my comments (though what you suggest seems completely nuts IMHO), I can genuinely say this is coming from an ex startup employee who has seen, and been subject to, many startup equity shenanigans (my comment history very likely touched on those over the years), so I will always applaud companies that generously compensate employees and not only senior management/investors.
Startups I worked before, who lost talent due to FAANG poaching (myself included), did not even have the business acumen to fight that, which would have been trivially possible by offering some liquidity at their “inflated” valuation. Instead, they kept those liquidity opportunities gated to senior management and investors. So I am applauding the difference in behavior here.
It strikes me that this is a massive red flag pointing to AI being in a bubble. This is an insane amount of money to give away to employees who were presumably already happy with their compensation package.
Given how high data centre costs are, and anticipated growth on spending, and how until just recently the company was actively seeking investment, to have this much spare money sloshing around shows how horrifically overvalued the company is. If I directly owned significant quantities of shares in any company that's recently invested, I'd be worried about an imminent crash in their stock prices.
It only seems like a bubble if you think this is that much of an outlier. $750k a year for 2 years is a lot, but it's not an outrageous grant rate for technical staff. It's high but not like 10x high. If it was actually a $1.5m bonus like the headline suggests, then that would be crazy.
People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.
People today still say NVIDIA is overvalued, that the stock price doesn't make sense given their revenue today.
> Tulip mania (Dutch: tulpenmanie) was a period during the Dutch Golden Age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels. The major acceleration started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637.
> At the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled artisan.
Despite being oft cited, that’s probably the worst poster child of bubbles by the way
It was a spot commodities futures contract bubble due to government regulation change in the futures market alongside border crisis in a neighboring country, so rational supply constriction
It ended due the bubonic plague ending the speculators so we don’t know what would have happened
Also it may not have been as silly as people make out. The Dutch still have a tulip industry with 2,600 varieties grown over 60,000 acres. It may have been worth spending ~$1m on a bulb if it was superior and you could breed from it and sell a lot.
I don’t think any commodities bubbles were irrational bubbles or good examples of irrational exuberance. Even the beanie babies one was rational until a seemingly permanent supply constriction was alleviated to the surprise of everyone.
So far I’ve narrowed it down to credit bubbles as being actually irrational, like the railroad bonds, and south china sea bubble, over leveraging in real estate market and derivatives with poor accounting of underlying assets
And yet tulips and beanie babies are the ones most cited
To be fair, if those people are right, then NVIDIA's stock price (and revenue) is part of that bubble, so its not really evidence that this isn't a bubble.
Time will tell if they're right or not. But it wouldn't be the first time it has happened.
> NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.
Nvidia sells (among other things) performance leading hardware products with a locked-in software ecosystem surrounding them.
> People said the same thing 2 years ago about NVIDIA, that their stock price didn't make any sense given their revenue, that is was an obvious bubble. Now their revenue is 10x higher, justifying the stock price from 2 years ago.
Your point is generally correct but revenue isn't 10x higher for the past 2 years, that would indicate they had about $260B in revenue this year instead of $130B.
NVIDIA annual revenue for 2025 was $130.497B, a 114.2% increase from 2024.
NVIDIA annual revenue for 2024 was $60.922B, a 125.85% increase from 2023.
NVIDIA annual revenue for 2023 was $26.974B, a 0.22% increase from 2022.
Honestly this just shows that deepseek and qwen teams werent lieing when they said US per token and training costs were a fucking lie and drastically over priced by the vendors in the US.
How do OpenAI employees come out unscathed if AGI/ASI ruins all future jobs? Why would OpenAI keep these employees around? Would there even be humans as part of "OpenAI Inc" at that point?
I guess I don't understand how anyone could keep an AGI/ASI that can perform any job in bondage/slavery. Seems like human exceptionalism/hubris at its finest.
If you have no mortgage, own your home, and have saved enough in investments, even if AGI/ASI materially impairs the labor economy, you are in a far better position than someone who rents, someone with a large mortgage who needs a job for the next 20-30 years, etc assuming rule of law holds up. Free money is free money, to not take it would be silly. Just don't blow it on a Lambo.
I'm not qualified to touch on your point wrt constraining and wrangling machine intelligence, so no comment on that.
If AGI gets invented and the requirement for labor goes away, even if not fully, then all bets are off - the entire economy, everywhere, collapses.
The fundamental underpinning of capitalism as an ideology is that people must work for compensation. As soon as that is no longer true, capitalism as an ideology and system no longer works at all, in any way. That means markets no longer exist, you no longer own your home, and as the intersection of economy and politics, it's highly likely laws no longer apply.
Were they ever missionaries in the first place? I imagine the founders and early employees were. But do you think most people hired after ChatGPT became a household name were in it for the vision?
The missionaries to Latin America that followed the conquistadors were largely Dominicans, Franciscans, etc who took vows of poverty. A few got encomiendas but they were by far the exception. Few missionaries got rich on that continent.
The AI race seems more defined by spending more money than the other guy, regardless of results.
The benefits just seem like a game of PR one upmanship tied to I don't know what. The OpenAI Ive acquisition / partnership is strange / expensive / the webpage was downright creepy ...
I think everyone should want a directional incentive that hard work and the kinds of success that attach to hard work combined with cultivated expertise would be lucrative, on average if we reward positive outcomes achieved in productive rather than extractive ways? Good system. No one is mad when the smartest person they know who works constantly gets paid out. Some of these people getting these nosebleed offers I'm like, yeah, you pay that person 50 million they make you 250, I've seen it.
But it feels pretty fucking random at this juncture, I know really strong people kinda getting by, total hood ornaments in like, stupidly senior slots, its like if you took OG Google tough but fair stack rank from back when they were legitimately elite, and just shuffled the deck until there were zero bits of information left.
How do you compete on thst with a rising China, an India not far behind, and a Europe starting to wake up?
It's funny how it's changed. Hassabis on Lex the other day:
>I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because it wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money, and these days, interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round. So it’s pretty funny. And I remember the days where I used to have to work for free and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now, it’s all the other around, but that’s just how it is.
I read recently that Meta was trying to hire employees from OpenAI/Google/Anthropic for higher pay, and that they found that OpenAI employees were the most willing to jump ship. It's possible OpenAI is having an employee retention problem, and this is intended to keep employees and help attract new talent.
Keep employees in the short term. After 2 years, employees can retire comfortably. When the salary becomes irrelevant, you can hang around for more beach homes doing what the boss wants and keeping your work proprietary to the company, or quit and do whatever you want and do whatever you want with it.
Or maybe the golden handcuffs are heavier than what the article makes out.
If anybody in OpenAI ever had any second thought about taking other people's property without consent, that doubt should go away now with $1.5M in pocket.
Except that, unlike a human, this particular "reader" can then regurgitate millions of copies of that content and all other content it sees, in seconds.
I wish people would stop treating this topic like it's not nuanced. It clearly is not as straightforward as either side would like to think.
Are there any news sources corroborating this? Maybe it's early but I'm surprised I can't find any articles from OpenAI or press outlets about this. Googling "openAI bonus" gives some reddit threads, some linkedin posts, and this hacker news post
I rent a room. After rent, I have ~200 CAD net positive, which covers food and gym. I can't really accumulate money at this point, but I have existing savings and a few investments.
Maybe there are, but I don't know. It seems pointless to try Fiverr and similar platforms, because it seems they are already flooded with freelancers. But I never did contracting so I am pretty clueless about that. I've read old HN threads and the general consensus seems to be that you have to have connections to get customers.
I used to do a 5 year stint working at a software company, saving up money, then 5 years working on my games. Rinse, repeat.
I got lucky a couple of times, so this won't work for everyone. But working a "real" job to fund your passion projects is as old as DaVinci taking commissions to fund his research.
Don't know your specifics, but I generally make the argument to people that if they have the aptitude for something very high paying that they do that job and then do something they like as a hobby.
I spend a very disproportionate amount of my mental energy on my job, and I think earning a lot of money would not properly compensate for that. Energy is finite and life has a way of being just about as expensive as the money you have.
So, maybe it's fine that it will take me 30 years to earn what these people will in 2.
it is an interesting feeling to be someone who was considered to be absurdly highly paid just a few years ago and looking at the landscape now where people in similar positions are making 3x,4x, more, much much more now. Hard to tell if jumping on the ai train at this point is a good or bad idea.
While I agree, it's also worth pointing out the different economics here. By the superintelligence calculus, "winning" the AI race has the potential to put a given individual/company/government in a position of obscene dominance in the world, so the potential ROI for this type of investment makes any cost seem almost trivial.
Both things can be true. The tech can be transformative, and the current valuations and burn rate can be wholly unsustainable in the short term. This is exactly what happened in the dotcom era.
Whether or not this one is the same is impossible to know until after it happens. But there are credible arguments to both sides.
This is a small handful of companies absolutely dominating the bleeding edge in an extremely high value technology that has value in nearly every other market. There's a lot of misses with companies implementing LLMs, but there are a LOT of companies that are using LLMs to deliver massive value that was impossible 3 years ago.
LLMs are not, in fact providing much value to any other markets. And the amount of value they would have to provide in order to pay back current costs is staggering. It's a bubble. There is no way any of these companies is going to break even.
Refreshing to see. Usually employees are being treated as a resource to exploit. There is system called "market rates", where labour cost is actually fixed across the domains and is disconnected from the value workers generate. So you as an employee can develop something that saves company few millions, but still you'll get paid £65k and then dismissed the moment company doesn't need you.
They’re most likely doing it, and structuring it to vest in 2 years, to prevent “poaching” , leaks etc. which strikes me as a very temporary situation.
I might get shit for this but 1.5m is a lot but for people who are relatively early at OpenAI - a $500B company - it’s not. I would be surprised if most engineers hired 3-4 years ago are not on paper at least worth $10m in NW. When I worked at other companies with a tenth or even a hundredth of valuation - there were tons of people who still quit knowing they were going to get $1m+/yr by staying.
1.5m to retain these people is a lot but it isn’t when you consider how much you’ve already given and/or how much they’re already getting.
I suspect - like many companies in the bay right now - the work environment is incredibly demanding and toxic. This ain’t faang in 2012 with ball pits and slides.
i'm having a lot of cognitive dissonance with the amount of money being thrown around -- you have people making a few dollars a day in some parts of the world, and in others you get an extra 1.5mm to sit at the computer for 2 hours a day and then take a nap. Let's be honest, not all openai employees are phd researchers, and this is one giant publicity stunt akin to a gameshow (Look at us! we pay a TON, much more than the other guy!)
black mirror-esque somehow. but hey, now a few thousand people in SF are guaranteed millionaires (as if they weren't already)
that doesn't even make any sense. if they believe they have longevity then they absolutely should be paying people to make a career there and not just go out in a bright flash
They believe the company has longevity, but that all the work at the company will eventually be done by AI, in about two year at a guess based on the vesting period.
sure, you can capture your biggest brains with massive salaries, but throwing 1.5mm at literally everyone is entirely silly, and to me shows that we're in a massive bubble and that is coming from someone who is fairly optimistic around AI.
it's all coming from the debt that is approved by congress 2 months ago. they get few million cause there is no real moat for OPENAI. It's nice extra bribe so they don't challange, lmao. Becauses now VCs have extra cheap debt too. Any top or mid lev openai employee reading this, as a group you worth 10x for this, to OUR DEBT lords. Simple.
It's a bargain I expect most people would take, even with what I'm about to say next, but I also predict this is going to be a situation rife with abuse, with employees being pressured to "work extra hard" (eg, live in the office) during these two years, and plenty of people being fired for under-performing (eg, not living in the office) so they can avoid paying out the bonus to as many people as possible. Also, most new hires will have the impression that another 1.5M 2-year retention bonus is right around the corner, but won't actually get one.
If you do that (to that extreme), then you guarantee they will all leave after 2 years, and you have another retention problem. That’s just bone headed in my opinion.
Depends on the strategic goals. Plenty of companies have succeeded running high-churn operations getting a few good years from employees before they burn out and take a lower-stress job, maybe not even with a competitor (because they don't want to jump on the same treadmill at a similar company), or even just dropping out to raise goats.
Doesn't this disincentivize their employees to work harder once they get the money? Capitalist have told me you must keep your employees on the verge of disaster to have a successful business.
It says every member of the technical staff. It also says it's a grant that vests over 2 years, so not what any normal person considers a "bonus". A bonus is cash in hand.
I've received some "bonus" performance related equity grants with a four year vesting period. These are beyond normal the refresher grants. They are not described by the company as "bonus", because we also have the sort of cash bonus you're talking about, but were I to describe them to people outside the company, I'd probably say "bonus grants" or something.
In this case it seems obvious that it needs some kind of vesting terms to prevent people from taking the bonus and then just taking another offer anyways.
> Every bonus I have gotten has been paid out in January based on past performance. That's why the term "bonus season" exists.
Hey, I believe you and have no reason to think you are lying. Every bonus I've had has been vested over a 2 year period with about 50% vesting upfront. Again this is probably due to my bonus being tied to performance which could change from year to year and the fact the its probably larger than the average bonus employees get.
Every company is different and every bonus is different. There is no one way a bonus is allocated.
OpenAI employees will now be able to afford to split the rent of a 2 bedroom apartment close to the Office...If they find 3 other roommates with the same bonus...
nah you can buy a decent place for around 1 mil in sf. these employees are probably getting paid pretty well to start with so i bet they can afford to get a nice place at a higher price point.
Back when Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and other big tech companies signed illegal anti-poaching agreements Zuck said no, I'll pay whatever it takes to attract the best talent, no matter where they work.
Facebook/Meta has consistently set the bar for engineering salaries across the industry, and Google and the rest are forced to match it.
Now every AI company is paying millions of dollars for regular engineers just because Zuck is out there throwing out wads of cash from the roof.
When it comes to salaries the man simply does not care about standards and precedents, and I love that.