10 ms·
One way to make sense of this specific case at least. - He's on track to becoming a top-tier AI researcher. Despite having only one year of a PhD under his bel
by SamvitJ 1y ago
One way to make sense of this specific case at least.
- He's on track to becoming a top-tier AI researcher. Despite having only one year of a PhD under his belt, he already received two top awards as a first-author at major AI conferences [1]. Typically, it takes many more years of experience to do research that receives this level of recognition. Most PhDs never get there.
- Molmo, the slate of open vision-language models that he built & released as an academic [2], has direct bearing on Zuck's vision for personalized, multimodal AI at Meta.
- He had to be poached from something, in this case, his own startup, where in the best case, his equity could be worth a large multiple of his Meta offer. $250M likely exceeded the expected value of success, in his view, at the startup. There was also probably a large premium required to convince him to leave his own thing (which he left his PhD to start) to become a hired hand for Meta.
Sources:
[1] https://mattdeitke.com/ https://mattdeitke.com/
[2] https://allenai.org/blog/molmo https://allenai.org/blog/molmo
- naveen99 1y agoMolmo caught my eye also a while ago.
- andyjensen 1y agoSame except a bit longer ago than that, but otherwise I agree
- tantalor 1y ago> could be worth... Exactly. What's the likelihood of that?
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> What's the likelihood of that? Sufficiently high that Meta is willing to pay such an amount of money. :-)
- siscia 1y agoAlso, do you have a better way to spend that money?
- SturgeonsLaw 1y agoIf it were me, yeah, park it in bonds and live off the interest on a tropical beach. Spend my days spearfishing and drinking beers with the locals. Have no concerns except how even my tan is (and tbh I don't see myself caring too much about that). I'd forget the word shareholder even exists.
- eastbound 1y agoAnd let others govern the world?
- sabedevops 1y agoI met a traveller from an antique land, Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. - Percy Bysshe Shelley
- aswanson 1y agoI take that more as a rumination on the futility of vanity and self-aggrandizing rather than "ruling the world " which in the modern day comes down to politics. Yes, there is considerable overlap with ego, but there's more to that topic than pure self-worship.
- nopinsight 1y ago
- gsf_emergency_2 1y agoIt's strange that Zuck didn't just buy options on that guy? (Or did he? Would love to see the terms.) Zuck's advantage over Sir Isaac (Newton) is that the market for top AI researchers is much more volatile than in South Sea tradeables pre-bubble burst? Either that or 250M is cheap for cognitive behavior therapy
- Hamuko 1y agoIn this AI hype environment? Seems doable to me.
- Infinity315 1y agoIt might make more sense to think of in terms of expected value. Whilst the probability may be low, the payoff is probably many times the $250M if their startup becomes successful.
- darepublic 1y agoYou can only one roll in the crapshoot of life though.
- cweld510 1y agoWhat matters is whatever he believes the likelihood to be, not what it actually is.
- bloodyplonker22 1y agoI agree on all points. However, if he already had several millions like Mira and Ilya, his choice to work for Zuckerberg would likely be different. Where is the glory in bending the knee to Meta and Zuckerbeg?
- ceejayoz 1y agoI’d forgo a lot of glory for $250M. I suspect I’m not rare in that.
- libraryatnight 1y agoI weep for humanity.
- ihsw 1y agoThat $250M is (societally) better off going to him than being spent on whatever the hell Meta was going to otherwise spend it on.
- ceejayoz 1y agoPeople say that sort of thing when it’s a hypothetical. It’s a little different when a quarter billion dollars is actually on offer. Hitmen get what, $5-50k? And that’s for murder.
- krainboltgreene 1y agoYeah man, that’s not fucking good.
- achenet 1y agono it's capitalism at it's finest. We get less violent because AI research pays more than murder, so more people focus on being good AI researchers than good killers, and the world is happier for it.
- exasperaited 1y agoThis is IMO a comical, absurd, Beeple NFT type situation, which should point us to roughly where we are in the bubble. But if he's getting real, non-returnable actual money from Meta on the basis of a back of envelope calculation for his own startup, from Meta's need to satiate Mark Zuckerberg's FOMO, then good for him. This bubble cannot burst soon enough, but I hope he gets to keep some of this; he deserves it simply for the absurd comedy it has created.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoBubble might not burst, if we can improve productivity in every field even 0.5%, that’s massive.
- hackable_sand 1y agoWoo Nightmare Future!
- exasperaited 1y agoIf you agree it is a bubble, you are agreeing it is going to burst. Because that is what defines a bubble. I have two questions about this, really: - is he going to be the last guy getting this kind of value out of a couple of research papers and some intimidated CEO's FOMO? - are we now entering a world where people are effectively hypothetical acquihires? That is, instead of hiring someone because they have a successful early stage startup that is shaking the market, you hire someone because people are whispering/worried that they could soon have a successful early stage startup? The latter of these is particularly worrisomely "bubbly" because of something that people don't really recognise about bubbles unless they worked in one. In a bubble, people suspend their disbelief about such claims and they start throwing money around. They hire people without credentials who can talk the talk. And they burn money on impossible ideas. The bubble itself becomes increasingly intellectually dishonest, increasingly unserious, as it inflates. People who would be written off as fraudsters at any other time are taken seriously as if they are visionaries and ultra-productive people, because everyone's tolerance for risk increases as they become more and more desperate to ride the train. People start urgently taking impossible things at face value, weird ideas get much further advanced much more quickly, and grifters get closer to the target -- the human source of the cash -- faster than due dilligence would ordinarily allow them. "This guy is so smart he could have a $1bn startup just like that" is an obvious target for con artists and grifters. And they will come. For clarity I am ABSOLUTELY NOT saying that the subject of this article is such a person. I am perfectly happy to stipulate that he's the real deal. But he is now the template for a future grift that is essentially guaranteed to happen. Maybe it'll be a team of four or five people who get themselves acquihired because there's a rumour they are going to have billions of dollars of funding for an idea. They will publish papers that in a few months will be ridiculed. And they will disappear with a lot of money. And that could burst your bubble.
- tom_m 1y ago[flagged]
- trhway 1y agoVarious BigCo-s have been reporting good results recently and highlighted significant AI role in that. That may be a BS of course, yet even if it is half-true we're talking about tens/hundreds of billions of revenues. With 10x multiple it supports a trillion like generic valuation of AI in business right now.
- sameermanek 1y agoHow much has the whole industry invested in AI vs how much revenue has AI generated in total?
- nerevarthelame 1y agoZuckerberg had a lot to say about AI in his part of Meta's Q2 earnings statement, but the follow-up earnings call [0] revealed the rather limited scope of AI in their ad business so far: >"The first is enabling business AIs within message threads ... We’re expanding business AIs to more businesses in Mexico and the Philippines. And we expect to broaden availability later this year as we keep refining the product." >"The second area of business AI development is within ads ... We’re currently testing this with a small number of businesses across Feed and Reels on Facebook and Instagram as well as Instagram Stories." >"And then the final area that we are exploring is business AIs on business websites to help better support businesses across all platforms ... and we’re starting to test that with a few businesses in the US." So it's just very small scale tests so far - not the sort of thing that would have any measurable impact on their revenue. [0]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2/META-Q2-2025-Follow-Up-Call-Transcript.pdf https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2025/q2...
- tomhow 1y agoPlease don't post shallow dismissals... - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html It's fine to think that we're in a bubble and to post a comment explaining your thoughts about it. But a comment like this is a low-effort, drive-by shoot-down of a comment that took at least a bit of thought and effort, and that's exactly what we don't want on HN.
- mizzao 1y agoIt's also possible, based on what happens to those who win the lottery, that his life could become a lot harder. It's not great to have the fact that you're making $2M a week plastered all over the Internet.
- zurfer 1y agoHe probably heard the memes, didn't really want to work for Meta and said a "ridiculous" high number and Meta was like: we can do that.