Altman and Amodei want more money, so why shouldn't the workers themselves want more money?
Matt Levine has written lately that AI labs have a fundamental problem about compensation and motivation. You have to pay an AI researcher so much money to hire them that they could, if they wanted, approximately immediately retire and never work again. How do you even retain them in the first place? He remarks on how certain parts of the financial industry also have this problem, and they've historically had some 'solutions' to it (e.g., acculturating people to having strong desires for otherwise minor positional goods WRT a small group of peers), but how those solutions don't quite yet apply to the AI folks. He writes:
The AI labs have found a better and more counterintuitive solution to the problem, which is convincing their employees that what they are doing will kill everyone on earth, so they have to spend all of their time working on it rather than getting manicures.
It is not entirely clear to me that if a person becomes convinced of that, then they should either spend all their time working on it or quit. I would also imagine that there would be a variety of motivations, probably similar to what one sees in the financial industry. I wouldn't be surprised in the least to discover that there are a decent number of people in the financial industry who ended up eschewing minor positional goods and just retiring off of the bank they made in a few years. Yet clearly others (e.g., the top leaders of investment banks) want more money. I don't think there is any contradiction here.
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Matt Levine has written lately that AI labs have a fundamental problem about compensation and motivation. You have to pay an AI researcher so much money to hire them that they could, if they wanted, approximately immediately retire and never work again. How do you even retain them in the first place? He remarks on how certain parts of the financial industry also have this problem, and they've historically had some 'solutions' to it (e.g., acculturating people to having strong desires for otherwise minor positional goods WRT a small group of peers), but how those solutions don't quite yet apply to the AI folks. He writes:
It is not entirely clear to me that if a person becomes convinced of that, then they should either spend all their time working on it or quit. I would also imagine that there would be a variety of motivations, probably similar to what one sees in the financial industry. I wouldn't be surprised in the least to discover that there are a decent number of people in the financial industry who ended up eschewing minor positional goods and just retiring off of the bank they made in a few years. Yet clearly others (e.g., the top leaders of investment banks) want more money. I don't think there is any contradiction here.
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