> As of mid-August, Meta had successfully hired more than 20 researchers and engineers from OpenAI for the effort, at least 13 from Google, three from Apple, three from xAI and two from Anthropic for a total of 50-plus new employees.
What makes you think the secrets are small enough to fit inside people's heads, and aren't like a huge codebase of data scraping and filtering pipelines, or a DB of manual labels?
This is a Bighead on the roof scenario. They aren't paying $250m to actually have $250m worth of work produced. They're paying it so that their competition doesn't have it.
If they are worth $250M to not work imagine how much they’d be worth if they said “screw that I’ll spin out my own company and license myself out.” I guess being paid a quarter billion to not work is hard to argue against though.
That implies that the dude can generate $250M+ of value in a couple years. No need to put him on the roof, make him work. But, my point is - doesn't it seem reasonable that if you hire 5 people who take the $50M offer, you have a good chance of getting a better outcome than hiring the one guy for $250M?
The pressure didn't come from investors. Investors expect Meta to increase capex by $30bn next year, a few engineers here or there is a rounding error in financial models.
There has to be adverse selection here from the amount of money being offered right? Like ok, very few people could turn it down, but it's not going to result in a motivated team.
I am imagining all these overpaid founders etc just sitting in a room like reality show contestants. Trying to make smalltalk, brainstorm jamming for months, not really producing much because... who cares, they have unbelievable money and this is the weirdest scenario ever.
I would imagine there is some sort of incentive structure for the megamillions being offered by meta to these people not just throwing all of the money at them upfront. Payout structed around meeting measurable goals not just show up and collect fuck you money. Or maybe it is silcon valley redux and they will set on the roof with big head what do I know.
If a business spends $40B to try to develop a new line if business, that is a business expense. If you are claiming that Meta’s R&D for virtual reality was not a legitimate business expense, but purely for Zuckerberg’s personal satisfaction, then good luck proving that.
Or are you arguing for a tax on revenue, instead of profit?
>are trivially available for a billionaires pet project.
What could this even mean? That it is trivial to become a majority owner of a business with enough cash flow to be able to spend $40B on R&D? If so, then you we live in different universes.
Not my opinion on it being a $40b plaything. That came straight from swe from meta who complain about it in these terms here on HN. It just tells me that their tax burden is too low. The fact that zuck is a billionaire means it’s also too low.
