In my writing, I lean on metaphors and analogies quite a lot, and I’m afraid I need to employ the same crutch here for the tiny handful of ingenious young men that are getting paid a fortune by Meta. I’ll just call this group The Incredibles.
As my Gold and Platinum members may recall, I wrote up a piece a couple of weeks back on this very subject and, for the first time in Slope’s twenty+ year history, I permanently deleted the post shortly thereafter. Before I did, I printed it for myself for posterity’s sake. I wanted some kind of evidence that I was right, but I didn’t want that post hanging around, even behind a paywall.
In case you’ve been seeking shelter under a rock the past couple of months, the word on the street is that Meta is shelling out nine-figure pay packages left and right to any of the handful of people (probably 1,000 total on the entire planet) that are extraordinary AI research scientists who are willing to join Meta, which is kind of an also-ran these days when it comes to AI. When word first hit about $100 million pay packages in late June, people (including me) didn’t believe it.
Not only do I believe it now, I know it, plus I’m here to tell you the job offers are much, much bigger than that. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
There’s never been an equivalent in the business world. Sure, CEOs and owners of giant hedge fund make huge fortunes, but this is totally different: this is a situation in which smelly, long-haired, nerdy, rank-and-file guys who have zero management responsibilities – – and who have probably never even talked to a girl without having to use a credit card – – are being paid salaries similar to CEOs of a Fortune 100 company.
This isn’t going to work. It just isn’t. You cannot simply hurl enormous fortunes at a bunch of guys drawn from a bunch of different companies, provide NO leadership, provide NO clear vision, mix ’em up literally THOUSANDS of regularly-paid AI engineers already there, and expect some kind of miracle to happen.
It’s the equivalent of putting together the ingredients of some kind of primordial soup into a giant beaker in a lab and expecting a human baby to emerge. It. Does. Not. WORK.
I was rather strident about this in my now-deleted post, but I say again, I have every confidence Meta is going to fall directly on its face. Over the past few days, I think it’s starting to occur to the market as well.
When I did my now-dead post, one of you mentioned a sports team (the Los Angeles Lakers, I believe?) as a fitting example of an organization in which huge sums of money were thrown at top talent, and it didn’t produce anything like the results desired. I’m not a sports guy, but that analogy sounds right on the mark. (Or right on the Mark, in this case.)
What if the world of information technology found itself for some crazy reason in a situation in which there were only a few hundred people on the planet who could program and run their systems? Those young men would have a tremendous amount of bargaining power, wouldn’t they? For as long as there was this curious and desperate need for extremely limited talent, companies would pay through the nose to have access to those minds because…………..what ELSE are they going to do? They have no choice!
But would companies be content to pay those mega-wages forever? Of course not! They would simultaneously be seeking a way out of this mess. Perhaps they could train more people to do the work. Perhaps the computers themselves could slowly take over the challenge. Or perhaps they could scour the globe to look for similarly talented people who were willing to work for something more reasonable.
My point is that organizations would seek to remedy the situation with substitutions of one kind or another, because anything else is an utterly unsustainable business model.
Count on it. This isn’t going to last. The superheroes of today are temps.
