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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   36045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Musk's secret? Elite human capital.

I still can't get over this picture of the Grok 3 team that built arguably the world's best AI in record time. Notice anything?

  • Exclusively Indian, East Asian, and White.

  • 100% male.

  • Everyone, or almost everyone, under 40.

  • No suits.

This is what extreme meritocracy looks like in an intellectual environment. Elon's secret sauce is giving geniuses the space to do genius things with performance as the only metric.

Obviously this can't work for every company. The number of genius workaholics is too small. But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.

Having read stories of how Musk treats his employees: I hope their sacrifices are worth it.

Musk has a better track record of producing results with those sacrifices than others do, after all.

Save your pity for the grad students working 80 hours/week in a biology lab, getting paid peanuts, working on a project that has a 0.01% chance of ever mattering.

The Grok team on the other hand? These are killers, working with other killers, on some of the most interesting and impactful problems in the world. They get paid in the top couple percent of workers in the US, and top 0.1% in the world. It's not a sacrifice, it's an extreme privilege.

How much credit will they get, other than the Sense of Pride and Accomplishment? My guess is no more than 0.01% of what Musk gets, all combined.

If "killers working with other killers" were treated akin to ancient war heroes, I might reconsider my position on that.

FWIW Grok 3 has not impressed me at all so far. It seems very confused about its abilities and more prone to hallucination than any post GPT-4 class model I’ve used. Additionally, the benchmark scores so far have been underwhelming. For example, a lot of Grok 3’s higher scores (the bits of the bar charts shaded in a lighter colour) rely on cons@64, shorthand for running the input prompt 64 times and then taking the consensus of results, which isn’t practical for most people. xAI are not alone in doing this, but it does make a difference for pairwise comparisons.

Musk has thrown vast amounts of money and compute at xAI and in the process he’s built something not quite SotA. OpenAI still the team to beat on performance, DeepSeek on efficiency, and Anthropic for vibes.

I used it for the first time today with some technical questions. For me it was very good. It's definitely much better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet which is my current daily drive. I haven't used O-1 though.

I also tried the Research feature which did a better job than Google's offering.

Grok won't be my #1 because it doesn't have API access, but my days of using ChatGPT as a secondary are likely over.

That said, I think everyone's mileage will vary on these things, and you're right not to trust benchmarks.

Edit: My mileage has varied. I asked Grok a fairly simple Regex problem and it bombed. When I used the "think" function it spun its circles for 2 minutes before coming back with some very convoluted but correct result. Claude bombed too. ChatGPT bombed as well, but fixed it on the second attempt. Once again, AI is great until you actually try to use it for anything.

No suits.

Most of the smartest scientific and technical minds wore suits for much longer than they have worn hoodies.

But Elon found a group of people who were comically undervalued by the market and let them cook.

No competent LLM engineer in San Francisco is undervalued. If he poached from Meta and OpenAI he did it either by selling the rationalist types a vision of better AI safety, (which he does / did seem to care about), by exploiting his personal fan base, or by offering the mercenaries more money.

The Vesuvius scrolls kid had to go to the university of Nebraska, I'd say that counts as undervalued by the market. "the pipeline" at tech companies has been deliberately bent to exclude young men like him from getting into it at all. Just look at Google's recruiting stats in their DEI reports from 2012 to 2022

All of the FFANGS discovered that the top performers from Land Grant Flagship universities were nearly as elite as CalTech/MIT years ago. In fact, one of the draws for FAANG was that the NAME on your alma mater didn't matter as much - what counted was work product like a GitHub portfolio, or performance in some of the CS / Cyber competitions etc.

All of the FFANGS discovered that the top performers from Land Grant Flagship universities were nearly as elite as CalTech/MIT years ago.

They may have discovered it, but they still focus their recruiting on particular universities (a slightly different set for each one, and some do include public universities), and getting their attention from another school is... difficult.

Going to a state flagship even if you could technically get into a more selective private college is pretty common behavior in flyover.

Did he have to, or did he choose to? It’s pretty common for Midwestern students to prefer to go to college somewhat close to home. A lot of us form lifelong friendships in high school, and going to college far away from home would tend to destroy those relationships.

You also save an enormous sum of money don't you?

Much easier to accumulate when you aren't spending 3 quarters of your 6-figure salary to rent a spot in a feces-ridden urban core.

genius workaholics

I know a few people like this. The 2 put together is scary effective in the short term.

In my experience, it doesn't last. A large portion of them burn out at they approach their 30s and turn semi-resentful. They make money, but their management/leadersip makes more. They haven't experienced much of life. Their heath takes the biggest hit as you lose your immortality in the 30s. And then ofc, The lack of bitches comes to haunt all men.

They tend to have zero human experience, so they end up in permanent "senior" IC roles, while their savvier & stupider friends are now ascending into VP-dom. It's like working in the military. It definitely shapes you in a specific way. But, it can be hard to adjust to civilian life afterwards. The classic example is HFT. Work through your 20s, retire permanently at 30. However, in HFT, you make 10s of millions instead of just a few millions like these kids are making. Not rich enough to Fat-fire.

Now, I personally love working with these people. They are machines and other than a few turbo-autists, most of them are good people.

I knew a few models in which life works out for these people.

Option 1 - Pump and dump yourself. (bail out at the right time)

  1. Startup path: quit in mid 20s -> build startup -> succeed big time -> retire in your 30s. (closer to the HFT outcome, like Brad Pitt in BigShort)
  2. Principal Engineer: For those with people skills. Quit for principal IC role in big tech -> get promoted to your level of incompetence -> live happy but under-stimulated life.

Option 2 - Become a 70s dad

  1. Arranged marriage: Indians & jews figured this out. At 30, millionaire Ramesh gets married off to the hottest trad-wife woman you've seen. Both of them love the arrangement. He buys a house in San Jose, so parents can visit all the time. Ramesh still works his ass off, but loses out on nothing.
  2. Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.

So yeah, couple of good options, but it is really easy to sleepwalk into your 30s with upper-middle class wealth and zero outside of it.

Exception to the exception - the best of them are monsters beyond understanding. Genuine ubermensch. Handsome, fit, smart, articulate and human calculators. Universally, they are either the most humble people I've met or sociopaths. No middle ground. They all love running marathons for some reason. In my experience, this group knows the perfect tipping point to start their VC funded startup or find a multi-million/yr VP role to camp at big-tech.

However, in HFT, you make 10s of millions instead of just a few millions like these kids are making

Huh, is this for the median quant? My understanding is you top out around 1-3 mil / year (at e.g Citadel or HRT), which makes “10s of millions” … tricky, especially after taxes, living in NYC, and also you have a 1-2 yr burn in period (so ~ 2 - 10 mil after a decade). Where are ppl getting these numbers??

Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.

I've been laughing at this for the last 10 minutes. WMAF couples are by far the dominant demographic in my immediate social circle.

Where this gets even more hilarious is when a WM-WF sniffs around the WMAF couple to determine they're probably kinksters, invites them (the WMAF) to some sort of sex party - and then horribly out-freaks the WMAFs.

The two dudes have to join different run clubs. Sad.

Is it a stereotype if it's true ?

Yeah, nothing about stereotypes say they have to be false. In fact, stereotypes exist because they are largely true. Black people really do love fried chicken, white people really do love ranch dressing and hate spices, and so on. Every group has its members to whom the stereotypes don't apply (e.g. I'm a Midwestern white guy who loves spicy food), but they still have a lot of predictive power.

Yes, stereotype accuracy is one of the strongest and most reproducible effects in social science.

Could you please link me to some choice studies?

I remember reading a book about it a few years ago, but for the life of me, can't recall the author or title. While I can't find it, just googling yields a ton of results.

Hmm. Not that much to go on here, but thanks.

What's the kind of thing you'd like to see? Pretty sure each link will have a tone of further references.

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Too bad in 10 years, the corporate grind will have eaten most of those people. Two or three will make the transition to management. About the same will try to found startups of their own, maybe one ending up destroyed in a lawsuit with Musk. The rest will find the company they work for sets the minimum standard at their highest previous achievement, and added a bunch of corporate BS on top to make that harder to achieve, and will end up burning out in the bit mines.

This doesn't pattern match similar people I know.

True, they will get burned out in a few years. Then they'll walk over to Google or Microsoft into a nice cushy job. They will have a couple million in savings by then, and will look proudly on this period of their life as one of true achievement. Some of them might found companies. Some might go into [[shudder]] management.

This isn't the corporate rat race. This is more like Bletchley Park.

More likely casualties:

  1. Dating and family

  2. The AI they create might eat the world

AI development isn't about stopping a mortal enemy, like Bletchley Park or the Manhattan Project. It's a corporate endeavor, there to make money for the companies who make it. It IS the corporate rat race.

God forbid an employee make money for his employer in exchange for a salary.

But I don't think that's even what's going on here. Elon is not primarily motivated by money either. He wants a freedom-maximizing society that exists on multiple planets. He likely believes that woke AI is a threat to this.

And yet, unaccountably, Elon is the one who ends up with buckets of money.

I believe that Elon isn’t primarily motivated by money - he’s motivated by power, which he wants to use to achieve his goals. But money is a proxy for any goal you care to name, because it can be used to achieve any care you care to name.

Older tech guys who know their worth will sometimes do passion projects for a discount, like film stars, and good on them. But “do it for the love” is an excuse used to fool generation after generation of passionate young people out of demanding what their boss knows they’re worth.

Yeah, "this job isn't about the money, it's about passion" throws up as many red flags for me as "this job is about bringing your Whole Self to work to be part of The MegaCorpoCubeMart Family"

Scam alarm, demand twice as much money or walk if the CEO can't show his $1 executive pay package to prove he's only in it for the passion.

I feel like I've stumbled on /r/fednews. Don't like your job? Think the CEO gets paid too much? Good. Quit and find a better one. Better yet, start your own business. It's still a free country.

You've stumbled on a problem with the system (from the tech guy's point of view). The skill that matters most for making money is not technical. Being a technical guy doesn't give you the skill to start your own successful business, and if you try to partner with business people to do it, they're almost certainly going to get most of the money in the success case. They'll be the ones taking private jets and entertaining celebrities in their multiple mansions, while the middle-aged tech guys are trying to stay current enough to keep a job to pay a mortgage on one house in the Bay Area and take a vacation (flying coach) once in a while.

My objection isn't to the employee making money. It's to the system that makes them "comically undervalued"; they are hailed as heroes now but they will continue to be comically undervalued in the future.

Fair enough.

The wages of these people is suppressed from what it should be for several reasons.

  1. They are young

  2. They are white/Indian/Asian

  3. They are male

  4. They are not posh

  5. Companies are rarely willing to pay extreme outliers what they are truly worth. The 10x engineer only makes 20% more than the 0x engineer.

None of that is likely to change. But I don't feel bad for them. No one is forcing them to work at xAI and this is the best kind of work for a genius. Also, they still make good money.

I have a 10x coworker, and from what I know of our company's pay scale, he makes around four times what an entry-level engineer makes, and probably twice what an unremarkable mid-career engineer makes.

Aren't they making $500k-1m/y total comp? Set for life even if they do get ground up after ten years.

Everything I've seen is that they make about $300k TC in the Bay, which isn't the insane salary you think it is, with that cost of living.

Twitter's not technically FAANG, but I think they need to compete with those salaries -- for which (especially in the Bay Area) $300K is nowhere near top-end.

Stock grant of that much again would also be nothing special for somebody at all in demand -- so $.5-1M TC sounds about right.

A Senior Software Engineer at Twitter makes about $335k TC. A senior puts you in probably your mid 20s to early 30s depending on how much you grind. A Senior MLE is 387k TC

Source: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-engineer/title/machine-learning-engineer?country=254

Levels tends to be a good source in my experience. If anything its high because people like to brag on levels. Honestly people wild overestimate tech salaries, unless you are a founder, are in at the ground floor, or have some astronomically rare skillset you get a nice 300k+ which isn't much in the Bay.

Aren’t ML / LLM engineers paid more than regular engineers coding the website or database stuff, though?

For context I'm an MLE, and while I'm not in the Bay, what I see is a 10-20% pay bump for MLEs over traditional backend SWEs. Frontend SWEs (Websites and stuff) are paid much less than backend SWEs. Database peeps can make wildly varying salaries depending on how much DevOps stuff they are doing and how critical the Database is.

MLE is generally a really nebulous job title as well, and than can really impact salaries a lot. I'm more analagous to an ML Researcher + SWE, but it can run the gamut from Data Scientist, Mathematician + SWE(I imagine this is a Quant), ML + Database/MLOps, SWE that interfaces with ML models, and most recently LLM specific Engineers (Generally called AI engineers).

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.

I get how vested options work, I'm in tech. xAI is private right? 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. I pulled the xAI from some leaked memo about the Lawsuit between xAI and OpenAI, it didn't include the equity split though (can't find it now rip).

However this says 188k - 440k, I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team, afterall someone needs to be the junior, and SWE2/MLE2s https://cybernews.com/news/musks-x-ai-jobs-salaries-/

You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.

Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.

To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).

However this says 188k - 440k

These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.

I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team

There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.

You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.

Trust me I do, the real discrepancy is that we have different risk appetites. But please keep talking down to me.

These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.

I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive. If the post-Elon twitter salaries are any benchmark, then the 118-440k are TC as well. That means probably about 50% is in equity.

To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).

Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them. If they vest over 3 years as is typical, that 150k vested would be 50k a year. They would be a fool to sell it to you at 10k, Realistically based on how much you value it they would be better charging you 3x-5x the price since you clearly think its worth it. Would you cough up 150k-250k cash for 50k vested stock in xAI? You do after all think it is worth near half a million+, that would be quite the steal for you...

There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.

You made me go back and count, there are 26 people visible in that photo. If we assume a typical corporate structure of Junior, Engineer II, Senior, Staff. The general ratio is a mix of 1-3 Juniors/IIs per Senior, and 1-2 Seniors per Staff. I'd say there is 4-6 Seniors and 2-4 Staff Engineers.

You say:

Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them.

You also say:

It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing.

How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?

I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive.

No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.

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Yes, they are likely making very good salaries. But the whole framing is wrong.

This is like asking how much the scientists working on the Manhattan Project got paid.

All of them? Probably not.

This teams looks diverse and inclusive to me. Hope they have enough equity in the project too.

On a more serious note - this is like rediscovering the wheel. This formula has proven track record. And I am willing to bet that they will be quite accepting of women if they manage to survive the initial hazing period.

Hope they have enough equity in the project too.

I doubt they have much. Elon's not dumb. He's not going to want people who are primarily money motivated. And employees who have fuck-you money are lethal to a startup.

No, the employees are doing this for love. I assume they make very good but not insane money.

On a more serious note - this is like rediscovering the wheel. This formula has proven track record. And I am willing to bet that they will be quite accepting of women if they manage to survive the initial hazing period.

Yeah. This "genius move" is really pretty obvious. And yet so few are willing to do it because they don't like the optics.

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