wlxd
4mo ago
I'm not really sure what your disagreement with me is then other than risk appetite and investment value.
Well, let's go back to how this exchange began, maybe that will help clarify things. I said:
When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
You then replied:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing. If so, then they are likely making far less than the 300k TC.
And then I spent a number of posts explaining to you how incorrect this attitude is. My arguments were highly successful, to the point where you are arguing against your original statement, saying that $10k would be a low ball offer for "their fake money that is worth literally nothing", and in fact, the actual value "is entirely dependent on the individuals estimation of its long term payoff and the time horizon on which they want a return on it". Yes, thank you, that's exactly what I was trying to get across the entire time.
My stance this entire thread is that Average MLEs working at xAI make the a likely comparable comp to other MLEs at other FAANGs, which is ballparked at 300k to 350k.
Let me then helpfully quote yet again my original post:
So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
And indeed, I am exactly correct: X AI valuation in May 2024 was $24B, and in Dec 2024 they raised another $6B, resulting in $50B post-money valuation. This is 80% increase in stock price. Assuming they got RSUs, and that their comp split was 50% cash 50% stocks, the $300k is now worth $420k (blaze it). If (which is more likely), they got options, instead of RSUs, then assuming, say, 30% gap between stock price implied by 409A valuation and the preferred price (you know what these two are, right?), then their $150k/year worth of stock options granted at May 2024 valuation is now worth $500-600k/year (if you don't understand how I came up with this number, X AI's Grok will helpfully explain it to you, just copypaste this paragraph to it verbatim, and enable Think mode).
Of course, if they got options before the May round, they might be making over $1M/year now.
Maybe, I'm likely to be wrong, betting against musk seems like a bad idea but at the same time the man just keeps betting on black, eventually he's going to lose and I currently do not see the value difference that xAI has over its entrenched rivals. A non-woke ai is great but I'm not sure to will convert into monetary value. I also think he made it to piss on Sam Altman in their little spat.
I largely agree with all of this.
I argued this point from my personal beliefs as someone who is in a position to go potentially work for xAI, it's not an abstract argument like it might be for you.
You are completely unwarranted in making this assumption, and you're only saying this to be nasty towards me. It's a really cheap shot, doubly so because I cannot show how wrong you are without doxxing myself. You can do better than this.
It does matter but there are so many of these companies that call you when you do AI/ML that they all blend together.
Maybe they do for you, but I have higher expectations of success for companies ran by Elon Musk, and value them accordingly.
But just because an investment is currently worth $0 doesn't mean you should cash it in for the first lowball cash offer.
I think you just use the word “value” and “worth” in a much different way than most people who deal with stocks do. By my definition, if the stock is worth $0, then any offer above $0 is not lowball. You seem to be interpreting it as “stock value is what it trades at on public markets” which is not that far from how I interpret it when talking about public companies, but completely useless and confusing when talking about private companies.
Most people understand that level, I guess you don't, or you desire to be obnoxiously pedantic.
I encourage you to try the following exercise. Pick any person, and ask him to name something he owns that’s literally completely worthless, as in, worth $0 to him, and offer to buy it for $10,000. Do you expect him to reject this offer, or eagerly jump for it?
Your argument was that someone is making 448k salary, you've pretty much agreed with me that no one at xAI is making that
No, I never said that someone is making that. All I said that this is reasonable range for cash compensation at a place like X AI, and that these ranges are only published to satisfy California labor law.
they might get equity but realistically since xAI isn't seed funded that equity is worth how much Musk decides it is.
No, Musk is not deciding that. Right now, X AI investors are deciding how much it is worth by deciding how much they are willing to pay for the stock they are buying from Musk.
And that's only if the company goes public
I already explained to you that private companies often offer liquidity before the company goes public, and we know that this is true about Musk companies in particular. I gave you a news article about SpaceX tender offer. If you are having trouble understanding what these words mean, I recommend asking Grok for help.
Yes, but there aren't that many people of that caliber to go around, and they charge wayyyy more than 448k in cash.
Yes, which is why I said that these ranges are irrelevant, and only there to satisfy California labor law, because equity is what matters.
wlxd
4mo ago
The Wlxd stance seems to be that is 450k TC and I would be stupid to turn down nearly half a million! I could work there for 5-10 years and retire early!
No, my stance is that you need to use your judgement to decide how much the stock is worth to you, taking into account all relevant data points. For example, you should consider the likelihood of that company succeeding or going bankrupt, and incorporate it into the expected value. You implicitly ignore this when you say that
[the] startup (...) is (...) trying to do the next big LLM/LLM Agent/LLM dongle/Dohicky/Whatever.
as if it didn't matter what the startup is actually doing. It does. Similarly, for me, there's a difference between how much I value Blue Origin vs SpaceX equity.
You put the labor in, but it's a toxic workplace and is killing your mental/physical health so you quit and forfeit. How much is that comp worth?
Working in toxic environment might command a pay premium? Wow, I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.
More seriously, obviously you should take this into account while valuing the compensation offer you received.
Because after all, you value it as $0 or somewhere low like that. However like any MLE, you are a smart fucking cookie and you look at your $250k salary and the estimated 200k equity you have and think 10k REALLY?. Would you really be so dumb as to take literal pennies on the dollar for your equity?? It's not worth anything now and it very likely could never be, but 10k is fucking chump change, pardon my french.
The point of my $10k offer was to argue that the equity in a private company is not worth nothing, contrary to what you said. This argument was extremely successful, because you are now arguing for my side, telling me that the stock is worth more than $10k, and that the owner of that stock should hold out for better offer than mine.
I've been in this field for a bit and know of zero no-name MLEs who make 448k salary. Maybe an Ian Goodfellow, or a Yann LeCun would command that sort of cold hard cash.
Have you considered that maybe X AI is trying to attract talent of this caliber?
In any case, the salary brackets in job postings for this segment of the market have no actual relevance for anything. Everyone knows that equity is where the action is, and since the California law does not mandate including equity compensation in these brackets (as if there even was a reasonably useful way to do that), nobody cares about these figures.
wlxd
4mo ago
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
You don’t need to move any funds. You can study AIDS on cancer institute funds. You can study it on kidney institute funds. You can do it on infections diseases institute funds. As I said, the way the system works is that NIH has enormous amount of discretion here. The only way to prevent it would be to literally have executive tell the underlings explicitly to stop funding AIDS, or have Congress pass explicit law prohibiting them from doing so.
Fraud is generally not covered by Congressional appropriations.
I’m literally telling you how the actual system works in practice. You can keep talking about appropriations and chide me for using the word “earmark” in a technically incorrect sense, but it is you who has no idea about how biotech funding actually works. Doing biomedical research that only tangentially concerns cancer under cancer grant is not fraud, it’s a day that ends in y. Talk to literally anyone in biomedical research.
wlxd
5mo ago
What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution.
As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.
Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it.
What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.
I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
Improving elections integrity, for one thing.
Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.
wlxd
5mo ago
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
wlxd
5mo ago
Beyond that, what factors would you include?
I explained it in the next sentence after wondering if you’re not trying to pull a fast one. Are you sure you aren’t?
Prison statistics in my country do not go that far back, unfortunately. The oldest statistics are only from 2000, but the cost per prisoner is almost the exact same when you account for inflation.
OK, where is it? I’m having a hard time believing that your costs are an order of magnitude higher than everyone else’s.
Beyond prison conditions, I would guess other factors like guard salary and construction are almost certainly higher as well (based on things in the rest of the country).
A typical inmate to officer ration in US prison is somewhere between 5 and 12. Let’s take the lowest figure. You spend $75k on correctional officer salary (actually your country almost certainly spends much less than that), which is $15k per prisoner. You’re left with $135k per prisoner per year. What could possibly cost that much?
wlxd
6mo ago
It’s only hard if the drones are autonomous. With piloted drones, the operator is broadcasting his position out in the open.
wlxd
7mo ago
Two years in, she’s still unmarried, childless, and does not even have a partner. (I checked out of curiosity after browsing my old comments and finding this one with explicit prediction).
wlxd
1yr ago
The AI companies are working very hard on robotics as well. It's not just LLMs.
wlxd
1yr ago
Egan’s “Closer” (1992) story also focuses on sex change. Strongly recommended, goes in pretty hard.
wlxd
1yr ago
All priors collapse towards each other in the face of increasing amounts of evidence.
Yes, but this does not address my argument that in practice you don’t get to have enough evidence to ignore this prior, because evidence is not free.
Given that genes have no almost direct causal impact on behavior except indirectly through other means such as IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing, it seems pointless to consider them when those things can be observed directly.
It’s the other way around. When you use race as evidence, you don’t do it by sequencing the DNA of the subject. No, what you do in practice is precisely using a socially constructed race as a proxy to make predictions IQ, personality, and cultural upbringing. You can’t cheaply get a lot of specific evidence about the latter, but you can use race stereotypes (which are pretty accurate) to infer these quite cheaply.
The direct predictors are what we actually care about, and race is only useful in-so-far as it might be a faster way to guess at them if you don't already have them and don't want to spend the time and effort to acquire them properly.
Which is exactly the case in majority of the situations. Indeed, you apparently agree:
Which sounds reasonable for strangers, but less so for people you actually know.
So where is the disagreement, exactly?
wlxd
1yr ago
There is little substance in your comment other than repeatedly claiming that racism is bad because it’s immoral, and it’s immoral because it’s evil, and it’s evil, because it’s problematic. If taking race into account when making consequential decisions about reality is considered racist, even if we only do it to the statistically justified extent, then I simply don’t agree about it being gravely immoral, because we do the exact same thing with hundreds of other characteristics all the time without an ounce of queasiness, eg. cultural origin, or education history, or density of facial tattoos, or clothing worn.
Your best argument here is where you claim that it’s too easy to assign more weight to this piece of evidence than it is actually warranted. This is true, but this is also true about other characteristics, discriminating based on such does not get such a privileged treatment, so why should I care much?
wlxd
1yr ago
Yeah, they signed agreements, and then didn’t keep to them. That’s not how you conduct diplomacy.
Yes, you are confirming what I said: Europeans don’t cycle to work a lot. Overall, maybe something like 10% does. Large majority of them drives. Sure, the split between driving and cycling is only slightly less lopsided towards driving, but whether 5% cycles or 10% is not substantial difference.
wlxd
2yr ago
Sure, most of the crime is committed in cities, and these have most impact on national statistics, but what I point out is still a death blow to your argument as stated above:
When you look at the UCR breakdown by county and municipality it quickly becomes apparent that it's not "America" or "Blacks" that have a crime problem, it's specific cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Saint Louis, and in some cases (where the data is sufficiently granular) specific neighborhoods like South Chicago and Central City New Orleans.
The places you listed do most of work in bringing up the national crime rate, but it doesn't mean that there is no "crime problem" outside of these. Heavily black areas in the South have huge crime problem, with homicide rates often nearing those of big cities with lots of crime.
wlxd
2yr ago
Many years ago, I hang out on an IRC channel, another member of which was a gay guy in his early thirties. He was pretty cool, one of my friends from that channel became close friends with him. He had a Facebook page, instagram, posted frequently, people I did not know would comment to his photos referring to some shared experiences etc (this was during the time when using Facebook was still cool).
Then, after a slip in opsec, it turned out that the whole guy was completely made up by another channel member, a 19-year old girl who spent 3 years creating and maintaining his persona close to every single day, alongside with a dozens of other accounts dedicated to make him more real, and of course her own actual persona.
wlxd
2yr ago
Vent moisture? Here where I am, the temperature is below freezing now, which is rather unusual, and my heat pump struggles a bit to keep up. Thus, I’m running a boiling pot of water non stop on big burner on my gas range, to both add extra heat with cheap gas, but also to add extra moisture, in 50% relative humidity range. Without it, and without my big air humidifier, it’s like 20%, which makes everyone in my family cough a lot and get skin issues.
wlxd
2yr ago
This is silly. The bots from the OP are fundamentally different sort of “game bot” than StarCraft or Dota or chess. This is what the industry moved on to: solving human psychology and language, directly.
wlxd
2yr ago
I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.
Often you don’t even need to wait, doubters often say things that are wrong already when they say it. Remember Gary Marcus? He was big a couple years back, but everyone learned to ignore him after basically everything he said was wrong.
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