10 ms·

Hypercapitalism and the AI talent wars

199 points by walterbell 1y ago

emsign 1y ago
Am I missing something here? What AI products will actually give you $+100T investment returns or whatever investors dream about?
- ikrenji 1y ago
  none. especially since once AGI is created the economy as we now it ceases to exist
  - bagacrap 1y ago
    But the way we measure money is by what it can buy (the basket of goods). Surely we'll still need food and clothing even after AGI, so can still measure wealth by number of burritos (1 burrito = $12 in 2025 USD)
zer00eyz 1y ago
> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is being used, never mind turning NVIDA into a 4 trillion dollar company. > Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble. All this signals is that those in the know have chosen to take their payday. They don't see themselves building another google scale product, they dont see themselves delivering on samas vision. They KNOW that they are never going to be the 1% company, the unicorn. It's a stark admission that there is NO break out. The math isnt there in the products we are building today: to borrow a Bay Area quote there is no there there. And you can't spend your way to market capture / a moat, like every VC gold rush of the past. Do I think AI/ML is dead. NO, but I dont think that innovation is going to come out of the big players, or the dominant markets. Its going to take a bust, cheap and accessable compute (fire sale on used processing) and a new generation of kids to come in hungry and willing to throw away a few years on a big idea. Then you might see interesting tools and scaling down (to run localy). The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.
- Avicebron 1y ago
  > The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money. "Local Model Augmentation", a sort of standardized local MCP that serves as a layer between a model and a traditional app like a game client. Neat :3
- ythiscoyness 1y ago
  > the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
  - harimau777 1y ago
    Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
    - asdf6969 1y ago
      1000x revenue not 1000x developer productivity is possible sometimes. There are lots of jobs where developers also decide on the roadmap and requirements along with the execution instead of just being ticket monkey and a good idea executed well could easily be worth 1000x changing button colours and adding pagination to an API
    - nopinsight 1y ago
      impact != story points
      - humanrebar 1y ago
        Yeah, story points approximate effort, so it's fairly impossible to be 10x on those. JIRA has a notion of business value points, and you could make up similar metrics in other project planning tools. The problem would then be how to estimate the value of implementing 0.01% of the technology of a product that doesn't sell as a standalone feature. If you can accurately do that, you might be the 100x employee already.
walterbell 1y ago
https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e39361ed00bb https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3... > Blitzhires are another form of an acquisition.. not everybody may be thrilled of the outcome.. employees left behind may feel betrayed and unappreciated.. investors may feel founders may have broken a social contract. But, for a Blitzhire to work, usually everybody needs to work together and align. The driver behind these deals is speed. Maybe concerns over regulatory scrutiny are part of it, but more importantly speed. Not going through the [Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act] HSR process at all may be worth the enormous complexity and inefficiency of foregoing a traditional acquisition path. From comment on OP: > In 2023–2024, our industry witnessed massive waves of layoffs, often justified as “It’s just business, nothing personal.” These layoffs were carried out by the same companies now aggressively competing for AI talent. I would argue that the transactional nature of employer-employee relationships wasn’t primarily driven by a talent shortage or human greed. Rather, those factors only reinforced the damage caused by the companies’ own culture-destroying actions a few years earlier. 2014, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-workers-settle-no-poach-case-for-324m-judge-has-real-doubts/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-work... > A group of big tech companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel, recently settled a lawsuit over their "no poach" agreement for $324 million. The CEOs of those companies had agreed not to do "cold call" recruiting of each others' engineers until they were busted by the Department of Justice, which saw the deal as an antitrust violation. The government action was followed up by a class-action lawsuit from the affected workers, who claimed the deal suppressed their wages.
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  Workers of the world unite?
  - walterbell 1y ago
    Neo-monks at cognitive gyms.
    - aspenmayer 1y ago
bix6 1y ago
“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega VC time!! Adios early stage, we’re doing $200M Series Seed pre revenue! Mission aligned! Giga power law! This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. Plus a total disregard for 99% of employees. The 1000000x engineer can just do everyone else’s job and the gigachad VCs will back them from seed to exit (who even exits anymore, just hyper scale your way to Google a la Windsurf)!
- anovikov 1y ago
  Ironically, there's no M2 expansion going on since Covid days and M2 to GDP is back to what it was pre-Covid and overall didn't even increase much at all even since GFC. It's only 1.5x of what it was at the bottom in 1997 when cost of capital was much higher than today. I think this concern is misplaced.
  - sfblah 1y ago
    M2 is the wrong statistic for sure, but the thrust of GP's comment is accurate, IMO. Fed intervention has not remotely been removed from the economy. The "big beautiful bill" probably just amounts to another round of it (fiscal excess will lead to a crisis which will force a monetary bailout).
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - immibis 1y ago
      We should be using some kind of weighted total of all the things that get treated as money. When a company makes a deal in exchange for shares or something, those shares are being used as money and must be included in any currency-neutral calculation of the money supply. However, most shares don't flow like money. You also have cryptos, which flow more than shares but less than government bonds and cash. It could be that the total of all money has expanded, even as the US dollar specifically stabilizes and slightly contracts.
alganet 1y ago
> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU
- rightbyte 1y ago
  It took me a while to get that it is satire. I tried to figure out the rules ... becouse it is satire?
danieltanfh95 1y ago
These "talent wars" are overblown and a result of money having nowhere else to go. People are banking on AI and robotics for human progress to take off and that's just a result of all other ventures fizzling out with this left for capital to migrate to. If you talked to any of these folks worth billions they arent particularly smart, their ideas not really interesting. it took us a few years to go from gpt-3 to deepseek v3 and then another few years to go from sonnet 4 to kimi k2, both being open source models on way lower funding. This hints at a deeper problem than what "hypercapitalism" suggests. In fact, it suggests that capital distribution as of its current state is highly inefficient and we are simply funding the wrong people. Smart AI talent aren't going to out there constantly trying to get funding or the best deals. They would want to work. Capital is getting too used to not doing the ground work to seek them out. Capital needs to be more tech savvy. VCs and corporate development teams don't actually understand the technology deeply enough to identify who's doing the important work.
- the_precipitate 1y ago
  I think one of the main issue is that the 10x or 100x talents in AI have not yet really show their value yet. None of these AI companies are making any money, and they are valued over highly successful and profitable companies out there because of their "potentials". ARR is nothing if you sell goods valued at 1 dollar for 90 cents.
- ijidak 1y ago
  I wonder at what point this becomes like guaranteed salaries in sports, like prominent NBA players, where you work hard to get the salary. And then once you've made it, you are basically done, and it's hard to get up and motivate yourself. You've got acolytes and groupies distracting you, you're flush with cash without ever having really shipped anything or made any money. You're busy giving TED talks... At that point, are you the 18-year-old phenom who got the big payday and sort of went downhill from there? I imagine the biggest winners will be the ones who were doubted, not believed in, and had to fight to build real, profitable companies that become the next trillion-dollar companies. Not that it would be bad to be Mark Cuban, but Mark Cuban is not Jeff Bezos. And for posterity, I respect Mark Cuban. It's just that his exit came at a time when he was fortunate, as he got his money without having to go all the way through to the end.
Xcelerate 1y ago
I find the current VC/billionaire strategy a bit odd and suboptimal. If we consider the current search for AGI as something like a multi-armed bandit seeking to identify “valuable researchers”, the industry is way over-indexing on the exploitation side of the exploitation/exploration trade-off. If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would instead attempt to incubate new ideas across a very large base of generally smart people across interdisciplinary backgrounds. Give anyone who shows genuine interest some amount of compute resources to test their ideas in exchange for X% of the payoff should their approach lead to some step function improvement in capability. The current “AI talent war” is very different than sports, because unlike a star tennis player, it’s not clear at all whose novel approach to machine learning is ultimately going to pay off the most.
- entropi 1y ago
  Agreed, and I suspect the explanation is that these plays are done not to search for a true AGI, but to drive up hype (and 'the line').
  - aspenmayer 1y ago
    The higher the line goes, the higher the expected value of return on investment. It’s a virtuous cycle based on a bet on all horses, but since the EV is so high for first mover advantage for AGI, it might be worth it to overleverage compared to the past for your top picks? These are still small sums for Zuckerberg to pay personally, let alone for Meta to pay. This is already priced in.
    - entropi 1y ago
      There are quite a few assumptions in your message. But here is, I think, the most crucial one: > but since the EV is so high for first mover advantage for AGI is it? why? I cant see why this should be the case. where exactly do you think the "moat" for AGI will come from?
      - 1y ago
mlsu 1y ago
The full bodied palate of this AI market mirrors the sharp nose of 2023 AI doomerism. The argument goes: if AI is going to destroy humanity, even if that is a 0.001% chance, we should all totally re-wire society to prevent that from happening, because the _potential_ risk is so huge. Same goes with these AI companies. What they are shooting for, is to replace white collar workers completely. Every single white collar employee, with their expensive MacBooks, great healthcare and PTO, and lax 9-5 schedule, is to be eliminated completely. IF this is to happen, even if it's a 0.001% chance, we should totally re-wire capital markets, because the _potential reward_ is so huge. And indeed, this idea is so strongly held (especially in silicon valley) that we see these insanely frothy valuations and billion dollar deals in what should be a down market (tremendous macro uncertainty, high interest rates, etc). AI doomerism seemed to lack finish, though. Anyone remember Eliezer Yudkowsky? Haven't heard from him in a while.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Maybe some of that frothy capital will finally leave the housing market.
- dukeyukey 1y ago
  > Anyone remember Eliezer Yudkowsky? Haven't heard from him in a while. He's quite active on Twitter.
- voxic11 1y ago
  He is releasing a book https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640 https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuma...
- xandrius 1y ago
  We are not really doing anything about climate change which has maybe 0.001% of NOT happening, do you think we would do anything for the reverse? It was and it is always going to be business as usual.
ngruhn 1y ago
> AI catch-up investment has gone parabolic, initially towards GPUs and mega training runs. As some labs learned that GPUs alone don't guarantee good models, the capital cannon is shifting towards talent. So, no more bitter lesson?
- blitzar 1y ago
  Those who dont learn the lesson of the last grift are doomed to grift over and over again.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Aren’t most of these deals locked-up stock deals? With lengthy vesting times, and performance based clauses. The signing bonuses are probably more than enough for regular people to retire, but these researchers and execs being poached aren’t exactly average Joe’s making $50k/year prior to being poached.
TrackerFF 1y ago
Also, the people being hired now for insane sums of money, are being hired because they have deep knowledge in design / implementation of AI models and infrastructure that scale to billions of users. In order to operate on a scale like that, you obviously need to have worked somewhere that has that magnitude of users. That makes the pool of candidates quite small. It’s like building a spaceship. Do you hire the people that have only worked on simulations, or do you try to hire the people that have actually been part of building the most advanced spaceship to date? Given that you’re also in a race against other competitors.
- parpfish 1y ago
  With all these mega-offers going out, I object when people saying that they’re paying for “talent”. These AI folks are good, but not orders of magnitude better than engineers and researchers already working in tech or academia. Lots of folks are capable of building an AI system, the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been in a situation where they have the time/money/freedom to do it. These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    > These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience” Well, yes. Talent doesn't exist in the form people would like to believe, and to whatever degree it does, experience is the most reliable proxy for identifying it.
  - BurningFrog 1y ago
    I would call it "skill".
  - beng-nl 1y ago
    I feel left out too, friend
  - roadside_picnic 1y ago
    As one of the many people who are fairly experienced in AI (but at small startups) and hasn't had Zuck personally knock on my door, I have had a few moments of "wait, 9 figure salary? Can I at least get 7 figures?" But the truth is it's not "just" about experience. Most of these people have been pushing the limits of their fields for their entire careers. It's not like having "the time/money/freedom" to do it is randomly distributed even among talented, smart people. The people in this talent pool where all likely aggressive researchers in a very specialized field, then likely fought hard to get on elite teams working close to the metal on these massive scale inference problems, and they continued to follow this path until they got where they are. And the truth is, if you're at least "good" in this space, you do get your piece of the pie at the appropriate scale. I'm still making regular dev income, but my last round of job searching (just a few months ago) was insane. I had to quit my job early because I couldn't manage the all the teams I was talking to. I've been through some hot tech markets over my career, but never anything like this. Meanwhile many of my non-AI peers are really struggling to find new roles. So there's no reason to cast shade on the genuine talent of these people (though I think we all feel that frustration from time to time).
bugtodiffer 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F
- guywithahat 1y ago
  The article has strong "let them eat cake" vibes
ygritte 1y ago
> It breaks down the existing rules of engagement, from the social contract of company formation, to the loyalty of labor, to the duty to sustain an already-working product, to the conflict rules that investors used to follow. WTF is this guy hallucinating about? None of that ever existed.
runlaszlorun 1y ago
> The French had a uniquely high Gini coefficient before the Revolution. I feel like this one line captures the elephant in the room that the author is trying hard to convince himself isn't there...
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  Nature finds a way.
- ta1243 1y ago
  French aristocrats didn't have trillion dollar industries brainwashing the population to be on their side, nor did they have AI powered armies to defend them when the people rose up.
hoseja 1y ago
Surely, SURELY, this has to be satire.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- guywithahat 1y ago
  The word "hypercapitalism" undermines any potential this article has to be serious. This is just ragebait
torginus 1y ago
Isn't this just shitty capitalism fighting shitty capitalism? If I hire a bunch of super smart AI researchers out of college for a (to them) princely sum of $1M each, then I could go to a VC and have them invest $40m for and 1% stake. Then since these people are smart and motivated, they build something nice, and are first to market with it. If Google wants to catch up, they could either buy the company for $4B, or hire away the people who built the thing in a year, essentially for free (since the salaries have to be paid anyway, lets give them a nice 50% bonus). They'd be behind half a year recreating their old work, but the unicorn startup market leader would be essentially crippled. You might ask what about startup stock options, but those could easily end up being worthless, and for the researchers, would need years to be turned into money.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  VCs aren't going to give $40m to a startup for a 1% stake
  - torginus 1y ago
    My numbers might not be accurate but the point stands, there's 'salary' kind of money, and 'startup valuation' money. Hiring away key researchers costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (an eye-watering never before seen amount of money before AI), but buying the startup costs billions. Then again, I'm merely a pundit when it comes to this, there's money (the cash Apple has locked in its vaults), and 'money' (Google executes a merger with a stock swap arrangement, essentially costing them nothing, and the stock jumps 5% at the announcement, even making them money)
vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
Must be nice to be able to ride such a wave and take your share. The money investors are throwing around these days is just insane. I remember it was considered a lot of money when Webvan got 400 million as investment during the .COM bubble. These days this seems nothing.
- SJC_Hacker 1y ago
  The big irony with Webvan was they were right, they were just about 15 years too early.
tagami 1y ago
How much do top professional athletes make? Soto, Ohtani, Mbappé, Messe… Multi-year contracts north of $500m. Perhaps this is the direction we’re headed in.. there will be many that won’t make it to the majors.
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  If it is anything like professional sports, then the leading companies should start hiring talent as early as possible. Might as well offer $1m to any and all fresh grads and researchers, before competitors can bag them.
jldugger 1y ago
> But why didn’t pricing for top talent run up sooner? Because before ChatGPT, nobody on a board of directors saw the possibility. Now, it's all they can think about.
lukas099 1y ago
I think it's unfortunate that the term "capitalism" has been captured by the left to mean the bad kind of capitalism, where regulation is only used as a moat for the established players. Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. But the term itself is poisoned, at least in U.S. politics, to where social democrat/liberal capitalists like Bernie call themselves socialists instead.
- jeeyoungk 1y ago
  But the term itself was created and captured by the left from the beginning; Proudhon first used it; Marx popularized it; so in the history of terminologies it always had the meaning that we associate with it. I like the term "market economy" or "commercial society" more, because it does capture more of what's happening on the market and the society.
  - lukas099 1y ago
    I didn't know that, thanks.
- throwaway328 1y ago
  > Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. Shouldn't we refer to the system by what it leads to in a majority of cases? Like Stafford Beer and the cybernetician's useful heuristic: POSIWID - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. I mean, the Nordic model is not predominant by any means, right? So why would we use the term capitalism to refer to that, or think capitalism generally leads to that? The thing we have in most places certainly seems to be dominated by monopoly players, with laws and regulation tending in most cases to protect that entrenched power and leaving the rest of the people mollycoddled and/or mistreated. Aside from that, I think your line of reasoning is factually backwards. The rights and protections that people won over the last few hundred years were ripped from the hands of the powerful forces of capital every time, and never given gladly. History shows clearly that these advances were won in spite of capitalism, not because of it - ironically, by the same "left" you seem to be deriding. This famous "capitalism as least bad system" argument, more broadly, of course, presumes we by definition can't do better in any possible future. This is taken for sophisticated wisdom nowadays, but is arguably just the standard modern cynical excuse not to even begin to think. "The Dawn of Everything" by Davids Graeber and Wengrow does an amazing job of showing this notion that humans are stuck in their economic systems to be a tired modern fantasy at best, driven by our lack of imagination and political sophistication when compared to our forebears.
southernplaces7 1y ago
"Silicon Valley built up decades of trust – a combination of social contracts and faith in the mission. But the step-up in the capital deployment is what Deleuze would call a deterritorializing force, for both companies and talent pools. It breaks down the existing rules of engagement, from the social contract of company formation, to the loyalty of labor, to the duty to sustain an already-working product, to the conflict rules that investors used to follow." Stopped taking this thing seriously with blurbs like the above. If anyone thinks that Silicon Valley was somehow previously ruled by some magical altruism that has now been forsaken, they're in a little cloud of their own. The motives have always been more or less the same and even many of the people too, and there's no mysterious corrupting force that made any of that different then or now. More money flowed in, technology developed more inroads into more people's lives and thus, the surface area over which the essential nature of tech business (like any business really) could be revealed more clearly expanded. This post is partly deluded.
Traster 1y ago
There's so much here, and not necessarily in a good way. The way this guy talks sounds a lot like those old effective alturist arguments that went along the lines of "Well if there's a 1% chance we can save a billion lives a thousand years in the future, that's actually better than saving 100 lives today". Ignoring the fact that "1%" wasn't an estimate that you could have any confidence in. Sure, if Deepmind could save a few percentage points on their data centres that would be huge! Becuase you've taken a small number you have no basis for (a few percentage points) and timesed it by the largest number you can find! Hey Presto! Big number! But then surely the guys at Google are morons right - because they only bought 1 Deepmind, they should've been throwing hundreds of millions around willy nilly! At these savings they can't afford not to! Secondly, it might be true that it's difficult for you to compete with these companies that are hiring in teams of researchers for hundreds of millions, but what you're also doing is handing employees hundreds of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money other than throw it into angel investing? You're literally sowing the most fertile ground for startups in history. I think we should actually be viewing this blow up in compensation in the context of the hangover of ZIRP and COVID. ZIRP basically made money in silicon valley free, tech companies could hire anyone they wanted at almost any comp and as long as there was growth there were no discount factors so they could effectively make infinite time horizon bets. Then covid happened and helicopter money came in to keep the economy going and Tech hired like crazy massively bloating lots of companies. But as things returned to normal, it became obvious that hiring had just been spending, and the returns weren't there for it. I think it's going to become clear over the long term that the same is happening here, Tech has tonnes of money so they're going to spend it, but 3 years down the line someone is going to do the accounting and I would bet you we end up back in the same spot that we did with Tech hiring in Covid - a long and painful unwind as companies have to return to reality.
bawana 1y ago
The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth. Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side. Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built. Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements. Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now? Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?

199 points by walterbell 1y ago

Am I missing something here? What AI products will actually give you $+100T investment returns or whatever investors dream about?

ikrenji 1y ago
none. especially since once AGI is created the economy as we now it ceases to exist
- bagacrap 1y ago
  But the way we measure money is by what it can buy (the basket of goods). Surely we'll still need food and clothing even after AGI, so can still measure wealth by number of burritos (1 burrito = $12 in 2025 USD)

zer00eyz 1y ago

> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns The fact that the author brings this up and fails to realize that the behavior of current staff shows we have hit or have passed peak AI. Moores Law is dead and it isn't going to come through and make AI any more affordable. Look at the latest GPU's: IPC is flat. And no one is charging enough to pay for running (bandwidth, power) of the computer that is being used, never mind turning NVIDA into a 4 trillion dollar company. > Meta’s multi-hundred million dollar comp offers and Google’s multi-billion dollar Character AI and Windsurf deals signal that we are in a crazy AI talent bubble. All this signals is that those in the know have chosen to take their payday. They don't see themselves building another google scale product, they dont see themselves delivering on samas vision. They KNOW that they are never going to be the 1% company, the unicorn. It's a stark admission that there is NO break out. The math isnt there in the products we are building today: to borrow a Bay Area quote there is no there there. And you can't spend your way to market capture / a moat, like every VC gold rush of the past. Do I think AI/ML is dead. NO, but I dont think that innovation is going to come out of the big players, or the dominant markets. Its going to take a bust, cheap and accessable compute (fire sale on used processing) and a new generation of kids to come in hungry and willing to throw away a few years on a big idea. Then you might see interesting tools and scaling down (to run localy). The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money.

Avicebron 1y ago
> The first team to deliver a model that can run on a GPU alongside a game, so that there is never an "I took an arrow to the knee" meme again is going to make a LOT of money. "Local Model Augmentation", a sort of standardized local MCP that serves as a layer between a model and a traditional app like a game client. Neat :3
ythiscoyness 1y ago
> the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. Plenty out there who want authors like this believing it enough to write it
- harimau777 1y ago
  Obviously the specifics are going to depend on exactly how a team pegs story points, but if an average engineer delivers 10 story points during a two week sprint, then that would mean that a 1000x engineer would deliver 10000 story points, correct? I don't see how someone can actually believe that.
  - asdf6969 1y ago
    1000x revenue not 1000x developer productivity is possible sometimes. There are lots of jobs where developers also decide on the roadmap and requirements along with the execution instead of just being ticket monkey and a good idea executed well could easily be worth 1000x changing button colours and adding pagination to an API
  - nopinsight 1y ago
    impact != story points
    - humanrebar 1y ago
      Yeah, story points approximate effort, so it's fairly impossible to be 10x on those. JIRA has a notion of business value points, and you could make up similar metrics in other project planning tools. The problem would then be how to estimate the value of implementing 0.01% of the technology of a product that doesn't sell as a standalone feature. If you can accurately do that, you might be the 100x employee already.

walterbell 1y ago

https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e39361ed00bb https://medium.com/@villispeaks/the-blitzhire-acquisition-e3... > Blitzhires are another form of an acquisition.. not everybody may be thrilled of the outcome.. employees left behind may feel betrayed and unappreciated.. investors may feel founders may have broken a social contract. But, for a Blitzhire to work, usually everybody needs to work together and align. The driver behind these deals is speed. Maybe concerns over regulatory scrutiny are part of it, but more importantly speed. Not going through the [Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Act] HSR process at all may be worth the enormous complexity and inefficiency of foregoing a traditional acquisition path. From comment on OP: > In 2023–2024, our industry witnessed massive waves of layoffs, often justified as “It’s just business, nothing personal.” These layoffs were carried out by the same companies now aggressively competing for AI talent. I would argue that the transactional nature of employer-employee relationships wasn’t primarily driven by a talent shortage or human greed. Rather, those factors only reinforced the damage caused by the companies’ own culture-destroying actions a few years earlier. 2014, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-workers-settle-no-poach-case-for-324m-judge-has-real-doubts/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/should-tech-work... > A group of big tech companies, including Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel, recently settled a lawsuit over their "no poach" agreement for $324 million. The CEOs of those companies had agreed not to do "cold call" recruiting of each others' engineers until they were busted by the Department of Justice, which saw the deal as an antitrust violation. The government action was followed up by a class-action lawsuit from the affected workers, who claimed the deal suppressed their wages.

aspenmayer 1y ago
Workers of the world unite?
- walterbell 1y ago
  Neo-monks at cognitive gyms.
  - aspenmayer 1y ago

bix6 1y ago

“The AI capital influx means that mega-projects no longer seem outlandishly expensive. This is good for the world!” Is it? This whole piece just reads of mega funds and giga corps throwing ridiculous cash for pay to win. Nothing new there. We can’t train more people? I didn’t know Universities were suddenly producing waaaay less talent and that intelligence fell off a cliff. Things have gone parabolic! It’s giga mega VC time!! Adios early stage, we’re doing $200M Series Seed pre revenue! Mission aligned! Giga power law! This is just M2 expansion and wealth concentration. Plus a total disregard for 99% of employees. The 1000000x engineer can just do everyone else’s job and the gigachad VCs will back them from seed to exit (who even exits anymore, just hyper scale your way to Google a la Windsurf)!

anovikov 1y ago
Ironically, there's no M2 expansion going on since Covid days and M2 to GDP is back to what it was pre-Covid and overall didn't even increase much at all even since GFC. It's only 1.5x of what it was at the bottom in 1997 when cost of capital was much higher than today. I think this concern is misplaced.
- sfblah 1y ago
  M2 is the wrong statistic for sure, but the thrust of GP's comment is accurate, IMO. Fed intervention has not remotely been removed from the economy. The "big beautiful bill" probably just amounts to another round of it (fiscal excess will lead to a crisis which will force a monetary bailout).
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - immibis 1y ago
    We should be using some kind of weighted total of all the things that get treated as money. When a company makes a deal in exchange for shares or something, those shares are being used as money and must be included in any currency-neutral calculation of the money supply. However, most shares don't flow like money. You also have cryptos, which flow more than shares but less than government bonds and cash. It could be that the total of all money has expanded, even as the US dollar specifically stabilizes and slightly contracts.

alganet 1y ago

> If the top 1% of companies drive the majority of VC returns, why shouldn’t the same apply to talent? Our natural egalitarian bias makes this unpalatable to accept, but the 10x engineer meme doesn’t go far enough – there are clearly people that are 1,000x the baseline impact. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obMRztklqU

rightbyte 1y ago
It took me a while to get that it is satire. I tried to figure out the rules ... becouse it is satire?

danieltanfh95 1y ago

These "talent wars" are overblown and a result of money having nowhere else to go. People are banking on AI and robotics for human progress to take off and that's just a result of all other ventures fizzling out with this left for capital to migrate to. If you talked to any of these folks worth billions they arent particularly smart, their ideas not really interesting. it took us a few years to go from gpt-3 to deepseek v3 and then another few years to go from sonnet 4 to kimi k2, both being open source models on way lower funding. This hints at a deeper problem than what "hypercapitalism" suggests. In fact, it suggests that capital distribution as of its current state is highly inefficient and we are simply funding the wrong people. Smart AI talent aren't going to out there constantly trying to get funding or the best deals. They would want to work. Capital is getting too used to not doing the ground work to seek them out. Capital needs to be more tech savvy. VCs and corporate development teams don't actually understand the technology deeply enough to identify who's doing the important work.

the_precipitate 1y ago
I think one of the main issue is that the 10x or 100x talents in AI have not yet really show their value yet. None of these AI companies are making any money, and they are valued over highly successful and profitable companies out there because of their "potentials". ARR is nothing if you sell goods valued at 1 dollar for 90 cents.
ijidak 1y ago
I wonder at what point this becomes like guaranteed salaries in sports, like prominent NBA players, where you work hard to get the salary. And then once you've made it, you are basically done, and it's hard to get up and motivate yourself. You've got acolytes and groupies distracting you, you're flush with cash without ever having really shipped anything or made any money. You're busy giving TED talks... At that point, are you the 18-year-old phenom who got the big payday and sort of went downhill from there? I imagine the biggest winners will be the ones who were doubted, not believed in, and had to fight to build real, profitable companies that become the next trillion-dollar companies. Not that it would be bad to be Mark Cuban, but Mark Cuban is not Jeff Bezos. And for posterity, I respect Mark Cuban. It's just that his exit came at a time when he was fortunate, as he got his money without having to go all the way through to the end.

Xcelerate 1y ago

I find the current VC/billionaire strategy a bit odd and suboptimal. If we consider the current search for AGI as something like a multi-armed bandit seeking to identify “valuable researchers”, the industry is way over-indexing on the exploitation side of the exploitation/exploration trade-off. If I had billions to throw around, instead of siphoning large amounts of it to a relatively small number of people, I would instead attempt to incubate new ideas across a very large base of generally smart people across interdisciplinary backgrounds. Give anyone who shows genuine interest some amount of compute resources to test their ideas in exchange for X% of the payoff should their approach lead to some step function improvement in capability. The current “AI talent war” is very different than sports, because unlike a star tennis player, it’s not clear at all whose novel approach to machine learning is ultimately going to pay off the most.

entropi 1y ago
Agreed, and I suspect the explanation is that these plays are done not to search for a true AGI, but to drive up hype (and 'the line').
- aspenmayer 1y ago
  The higher the line goes, the higher the expected value of return on investment. It’s a virtuous cycle based on a bet on all horses, but since the EV is so high for first mover advantage for AGI, it might be worth it to overleverage compared to the past for your top picks? These are still small sums for Zuckerberg to pay personally, let alone for Meta to pay. This is already priced in.
  - entropi 1y ago
    There are quite a few assumptions in your message. But here is, I think, the most crucial one: > but since the EV is so high for first mover advantage for AGI is it? why? I cant see why this should be the case. where exactly do you think the "moat" for AGI will come from?
    - 1y ago

mlsu 1y ago

The full bodied palate of this AI market mirrors the sharp nose of 2023 AI doomerism. The argument goes: if AI is going to destroy humanity, even if that is a 0.001% chance, we should all totally re-wire society to prevent that from happening, because the _potential_ risk is so huge. Same goes with these AI companies. What they are shooting for, is to replace white collar workers completely. Every single white collar employee, with their expensive MacBooks, great healthcare and PTO, and lax 9-5 schedule, is to be eliminated completely. IF this is to happen, even if it's a 0.001% chance, we should totally re-wire capital markets, because the _potential reward_ is so huge. And indeed, this idea is so strongly held (especially in silicon valley) that we see these insanely frothy valuations and billion dollar deals in what should be a down market (tremendous macro uncertainty, high interest rates, etc). AI doomerism seemed to lack finish, though. Anyone remember Eliezer Yudkowsky? Haven't heard from him in a while.

HPsquared 1y ago
Maybe some of that frothy capital will finally leave the housing market.
dukeyukey 1y ago
> Anyone remember Eliezer Yudkowsky? Haven't heard from him in a while. He's quite active on Twitter.
voxic11 1y ago
He is releasing a book https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuman/dp/0316595640 https://www.amazon.com/Anyone-Builds-Everyone-Dies-Superhuma...
xandrius 1y ago
We are not really doing anything about climate change which has maybe 0.001% of NOT happening, do you think we would do anything for the reverse? It was and it is always going to be business as usual.

ngruhn 1y ago

> AI catch-up investment has gone parabolic, initially towards GPUs and mega training runs. As some labs learned that GPUs alone don't guarantee good models, the capital cannon is shifting towards talent. So, no more bitter lesson?

blitzar 1y ago
Those who dont learn the lesson of the last grift are doomed to grift over and over again.

TrackerFF 1y ago

Aren’t most of these deals locked-up stock deals? With lengthy vesting times, and performance based clauses. The signing bonuses are probably more than enough for regular people to retire, but these researchers and execs being poached aren’t exactly average Joe’s making $50k/year prior to being poached.

TrackerFF 1y ago

Also, the people being hired now for insane sums of money, are being hired because they have deep knowledge in design / implementation of AI models and infrastructure that scale to billions of users. In order to operate on a scale like that, you obviously need to have worked somewhere that has that magnitude of users. That makes the pool of candidates quite small. It’s like building a spaceship. Do you hire the people that have only worked on simulations, or do you try to hire the people that have actually been part of building the most advanced spaceship to date? Given that you’re also in a race against other competitors.

parpfish 1y ago
With all these mega-offers going out, I object when people saying that they’re paying for “talent”. These AI folks are good, but not orders of magnitude better than engineers and researchers already working in tech or academia. Lots of folks are capable of building an AI system, the reason they haven’t is that they haven’t been in a situation where they have the time/money/freedom to do it. These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience”
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  > These mega offers aren’t about “talent”, they are about “experience” Well, yes. Talent doesn't exist in the form people would like to believe, and to whatever degree it does, experience is the most reliable proxy for identifying it.
- BurningFrog 1y ago
  I would call it "skill".
- beng-nl 1y ago
  I feel left out too, friend
- roadside_picnic 1y ago
  As one of the many people who are fairly experienced in AI (but at small startups) and hasn't had Zuck personally knock on my door, I have had a few moments of "wait, 9 figure salary? Can I at least get 7 figures?" But the truth is it's not "just" about experience. Most of these people have been pushing the limits of their fields for their entire careers. It's not like having "the time/money/freedom" to do it is randomly distributed even among talented, smart people. The people in this talent pool where all likely aggressive researchers in a very specialized field, then likely fought hard to get on elite teams working close to the metal on these massive scale inference problems, and they continued to follow this path until they got where they are. And the truth is, if you're at least "good" in this space, you do get your piece of the pie at the appropriate scale. I'm still making regular dev income, but my last round of job searching (just a few months ago) was insane. I had to quit my job early because I couldn't manage the all the teams I was talking to. I've been through some hot tech markets over my career, but never anything like this. Meanwhile many of my non-AI peers are really struggling to find new roles. So there's no reason to cast shade on the genuine talent of these people (though I think we all feel that frustration from time to time).

bugtodiffer 1y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Socialism%3F

guywithahat 1y ago
The article has strong "let them eat cake" vibes

ygritte 1y ago

> It breaks down the existing rules of engagement, from the social contract of company formation, to the loyalty of labor, to the duty to sustain an already-working product, to the conflict rules that investors used to follow. WTF is this guy hallucinating about? None of that ever existed.

runlaszlorun 1y ago

> The French had a uniquely high Gini coefficient before the Revolution. I feel like this one line captures the elephant in the room that the author is trying hard to convince himself isn't there...

mattgreenrocks 1y ago
Nature finds a way.
ta1243 1y ago
French aristocrats didn't have trillion dollar industries brainwashing the population to be on their side, nor did they have AI powered armies to defend them when the people rose up.

hoseja 1y ago

Surely, SURELY, this has to be satire.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
guywithahat 1y ago
The word "hypercapitalism" undermines any potential this article has to be serious. This is just ragebait

torginus 1y ago

Isn't this just shitty capitalism fighting shitty capitalism? If I hire a bunch of super smart AI researchers out of college for a (to them) princely sum of $1M each, then I could go to a VC and have them invest $40m for and 1% stake. Then since these people are smart and motivated, they build something nice, and are first to market with it. If Google wants to catch up, they could either buy the company for $4B, or hire away the people who built the thing in a year, essentially for free (since the salaries have to be paid anyway, lets give them a nice 50% bonus). They'd be behind half a year recreating their old work, but the unicorn startup market leader would be essentially crippled. You might ask what about startup stock options, but those could easily end up being worthless, and for the researchers, would need years to be turned into money.

SJC_Hacker 1y ago
VCs aren't going to give $40m to a startup for a 1% stake
- torginus 1y ago
  My numbers might not be accurate but the point stands, there's 'salary' kind of money, and 'startup valuation' money. Hiring away key researchers costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars (an eye-watering never before seen amount of money before AI), but buying the startup costs billions. Then again, I'm merely a pundit when it comes to this, there's money (the cash Apple has locked in its vaults), and 'money' (Google executes a merger with a stock swap arrangement, essentially costing them nothing, and the stock jumps 5% at the announcement, even making them money)

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago

Must be nice to be able to ride such a wave and take your share. The money investors are throwing around these days is just insane. I remember it was considered a lot of money when Webvan got 400 million as investment during the .COM bubble. These days this seems nothing.

SJC_Hacker 1y ago
The big irony with Webvan was they were right, they were just about 15 years too early.

tagami 1y ago

How much do top professional athletes make? Soto, Ohtani, Mbappé, Messe… Multi-year contracts north of $500m. Perhaps this is the direction we’re headed in.. there will be many that won’t make it to the majors.

TrackerFF 1y ago
If it is anything like professional sports, then the leading companies should start hiring talent as early as possible. Might as well offer $1m to any and all fresh grads and researchers, before competitors can bag them.

jldugger 1y ago

> But why didn’t pricing for top talent run up sooner? Because before ChatGPT, nobody on a board of directors saw the possibility. Now, it's all they can think about.

lukas099 1y ago

I think it's unfortunate that the term "capitalism" has been captured by the left to mean the bad kind of capitalism, where regulation is only used as a moat for the established players. Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. But the term itself is poisoned, at least in U.S. politics, to where social democrat/liberal capitalists like Bernie call themselves socialists instead.

jeeyoungk 1y ago
But the term itself was created and captured by the left from the beginning; Proudhon first used it; Marx popularized it; so in the history of terminologies it always had the meaning that we associate with it. I like the term "market economy" or "commercial society" more, because it does capture more of what's happening on the market and the society.
- lukas099 1y ago
  I didn't know that, thanks.
throwaway328 1y ago
> Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections. Shouldn't we refer to the system by what it leads to in a majority of cases? Like Stafford Beer and the cybernetician's useful heuristic: POSIWID - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. I mean, the Nordic model is not predominant by any means, right? So why would we use the term capitalism to refer to that, or think capitalism generally leads to that? The thing we have in most places certainly seems to be dominated by monopoly players, with laws and regulation tending in most cases to protect that entrenched power and leaving the rest of the people mollycoddled and/or mistreated. Aside from that, I think your line of reasoning is factually backwards. The rights and protections that people won over the last few hundred years were ripped from the hands of the powerful forces of capital every time, and never given gladly. History shows clearly that these advances were won in spite of capitalism, not because of it - ironically, by the same "left" you seem to be deriding. This famous "capitalism as least bad system" argument, more broadly, of course, presumes we by definition can't do better in any possible future. This is taken for sophisticated wisdom nowadays, but is arguably just the standard modern cynical excuse not to even begin to think. "The Dawn of Everything" by Davids Graeber and Wengrow does an amazing job of showing this notion that humans are stuck in their economic systems to be a tired modern fantasy at best, driven by our lack of imagination and political sophistication when compared to our forebears.

southernplaces7 1y ago

"Silicon Valley built up decades of trust – a combination of social contracts and faith in the mission. But the step-up in the capital deployment is what Deleuze would call a deterritorializing force, for both companies and talent pools. It breaks down the existing rules of engagement, from the social contract of company formation, to the loyalty of labor, to the duty to sustain an already-working product, to the conflict rules that investors used to follow." Stopped taking this thing seriously with blurbs like the above. If anyone thinks that Silicon Valley was somehow previously ruled by some magical altruism that has now been forsaken, they're in a little cloud of their own. The motives have always been more or less the same and even many of the people too, and there's no mysterious corrupting force that made any of that different then or now. More money flowed in, technology developed more inroads into more people's lives and thus, the surface area over which the essential nature of tech business (like any business really) could be revealed more clearly expanded. This post is partly deluded.

Traster 1y ago

There's so much here, and not necessarily in a good way. The way this guy talks sounds a lot like those old effective alturist arguments that went along the lines of "Well if there's a 1% chance we can save a billion lives a thousand years in the future, that's actually better than saving 100 lives today". Ignoring the fact that "1%" wasn't an estimate that you could have any confidence in. Sure, if Deepmind could save a few percentage points on their data centres that would be huge! Becuase you've taken a small number you have no basis for (a few percentage points) and timesed it by the largest number you can find! Hey Presto! Big number! But then surely the guys at Google are morons right - because they only bought 1 Deepmind, they should've been throwing hundreds of millions around willy nilly! At these savings they can't afford not to! Secondly, it might be true that it's difficult for you to compete with these companies that are hiring in teams of researchers for hundreds of millions, but what you're also doing is handing employees hundreds of millions of dollars. What are they going to do with that money other than throw it into angel investing? You're literally sowing the most fertile ground for startups in history. I think we should actually be viewing this blow up in compensation in the context of the hangover of ZIRP and COVID. ZIRP basically made money in silicon valley free, tech companies could hire anyone they wanted at almost any comp and as long as there was growth there were no discount factors so they could effectively make infinite time horizon bets. Then covid happened and helicopter money came in to keep the economy going and Tech hired like crazy massively bloating lots of companies. But as things returned to normal, it became obvious that hiring had just been spending, and the returns weren't there for it. I think it's going to become clear over the long term that the same is happening here, Tech has tonnes of money so they're going to spend it, but 3 years down the line someone is going to do the accounting and I would bet you we end up back in the same spot that we did with Tech hiring in Covid - a long and painful unwind as companies have to return to reality.

bawana 1y ago

The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth. Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side. Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built. Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements. Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now? Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?