AI researchers are now getting poached for $100 million bonuses and $250 million pay packages, but things were markedly different just over a decade ago.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said that AI interns are now are making more money than DeepMind had raised in its seed round. Hassabis said that back in 2010, AI wasn’t seen as the revolutionary technology it is today, and it was hard to raise money for their AI startup. Things obviously are markedly different now, with companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a single researcher.
“One has to pay people their market rates, and that continues to go up (for AI researchers),” Hassabis said on the Lex Fridman podcast. “I was expecting this because more and more people are finally realizing what I’ve always known for 30 plus years now, which is that AGI is the most important technology probably that’s ever going to be invented,” he added.
Hassabis said that things were very different when he’d co-founded DeepMind as an AI startup in 2010. “People in AI these days are very well paid. I remember when we were starting out back in 2010, I didn’t even pay myself a couple of years because there wasn’t enough money. We couldn’t raise any money. These days interns are being paid the amount that we raised as our first entire seed round,” he said, smiling.
“It’s pretty funny. I remember the days where we used to have to work for free, and almost pay my own way to do an internship. Right now it’s all the other way around, but that’s just how it is. It’s the new world,” Hassabis said.
Hassabis however said that these discussions on high salaries might seem trivial in a post AGI world. “We’ve been discussing what happens post-AGI and energy systems are solved and so on. What is money even going to mean? And we’re going have much bigger issues to work through — how does the economy function in that world and companies? So I think, it’s a little bit of a side issue about salaries and things of like that today when you’re facing such gigantic consequences and gigantic fascinating scientific questions, which may be only a few years away,” he added.
To someone who is working in AI today, it would be fascinating to hear of the struggles of people who were in the field in 2010. Even someone of the caliber of Demis Hassabis — who now has a knighthood and a Nobel Prize — was finding it hard to raise money for his AI company, and had to go without paying himself for long periods of time. Back then, AI was yet another unproven technology with lots of potential, but with seemingly few backers. But pioneers like Hassabis and many others persisted with AI despite all odds, and laid the groundwork of the AI revolution we find ourselves in today.