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Trust me I do, the real discrepancy is that we have different risk appetites. But please keep talking down to me.
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.
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...
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:
You also say:
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
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.
Sigh Ok lets play do this dance then...
Here's a hypothetical: Say I'm a Senior MLE with 8+ years of experience looking for a new job. I get contacted by/apply at a startup that is a start trying to do the next big LLM/LLM Agent/LLM dongle/Dohicky/Whatever. They cite to me an impressive amount of "just so" about who's funding them/running them/working at them and that their strategy to capitalize on ELITE human capital like myself as a non-progressive, white, male. With me so far?
They are a Series A/B startup, and don't believe in remote work so I'll have to move to the Bay, non-negotiable. Their comp offer to me is: 250k Base + 200k in equity + 50k in equity every year after the first that I work there. Equity value was calculated based on the rate sold to their investors. Vested over several years to make sure I stick around. If I leave early, before it vests, I will forfeit my shares. Pretty standard.
Ok first question, how much is that comp offer worth?
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!
The Akka stance is that the 250k base is nice, but that 200k equity is realistically worth $0 at this time. It could pay off but it also very likely could not. The LLM market is very saturated right now. Everyone and their rich uncle is trying to capitalize on it. Akka would consider that offer based on the base and how worthwhile that job would be, with the equity as a nice-to-have but not absolute. For this hypothetical, let's just say Akka takes it.
The next month the company goes bankrupt. How much is that comp worth?
Or:
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?
The rival company has a better strategy and a headstart, they beat you to market, you IPO late. How much is that comp worth?
Your company's CEO is a known narcissistic asshole and while he's good at his job, one day he decides he doesn't like you and shit-cans your ass: How much is that comp worth?
In addition to being a narcissistic asshole your CEO also gets involved in politics, the other side develops quite the hateboner for him and when the incumbent swaps they punish him. How much is that comp worth?
Now somewhere before this all happens some rando on the internet has a PRIME offer for you. He'll give you 10k for all of your equity. 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. Then this Internet rando has the gall to tell you he thinks it's worth millions. You definitely aren't selling it to him at 10k a pop now, if this investment is worth so much then why doesn't he put his money where his mouth is and buy it from you at 90-95 cents on the dollar after all it's an AMAZING investment?
And yes, I get that its an investment, like i said it's all about risk appetite, and obviously, mine is less than yours. Lots of people who work at startups probably have a closer appetite to you, but also lots of them end up with nothing. That said 10k is an insultingly low offer and you clearly don't think it's a good investment or you would have offered more so....
Afterword
We can just agree to disagree on this. 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. Even the Senior Staff SWE at twitter make like 275k Salary, their half a million comps come from equity which is calculated in. As far as I know neither Ian, or Yann, or Schmidhuber, et al work at xAI, and in fact I don't know any big name who does. If you do, feel free to share for my learning.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does matter but there are so many of these companies that call you when you do AI/ML that they all blend together. They have very little in the way of actual value add. I have personal, if-non-proven, technical opinions on how unlikely these companies are to take-off. It was pointless for the hypothetical because while I wouldn't take an xAI-like job 26 people did.
It actually makes my point; it is worth $0. But just because an investment is currently worth $0 doesn't mean you should cash it in for the first lowball cash offer. Most people understand that level, I guess you don't, or you desire to be obnoxiously pedantic. Whatever...
Your argument was that someone is making 448k salary, you've pretty much agreed with me that no one at xAI is making that, they might get equity but realistically since xAI isn't seed funded that equity is worth how much Musk decides it is. And that's only if the company goes public. Looping us back to the above argument where it is currently worth $0 but could potentially be worth a Bajillion, but it's not like they can live off of xAI stock before that happens. Hence their TC is their salary + bonus. Which is likely ballparked at 300k just like Twitter/X MLEs... So again, they aren't living like kings and there is no guarantee that they will retire early in the future either. They are in it likely for the name-rec and love of the tech.
Yes, but there aren't that many people of that caliber to go around, and they charge wayyyy more than 448k in cash. Google just "paid" the creator of the transformer over a billion in cash to come back to work for them, by buying out his current company.
Regardless of whether transformers are a dead-end or not, the current approach isn't doing new science or algo design. Its throwing more and more compute at the problem and then doing the Deepseek approach of finetuning the assembly level gpu instructions to exploit the compute even better so you can throw more compute at it. I doubt, Hinton, Goodfellow, LeCunn, Schimdhubber et al. have any desire to do that. Maybe if xAI did something revolutionary like leave the LLM space or introduce a non-MoE-Transformer model for AGI, then talent of that caliber might want to work there. Currently they exist so Elon can piss all over Altman.
Fetishizing algorithmic design is, I think, a sign of mediocre understanding of ML, being enthralled by cleverness. Data engineering carves more interesting structure into weighs.
Senpai comes down from his castle in the clouds to debate me... What a time to be alive.
This isn't data engineering either. Its low-level Cuda compiler writing and server orchestration. Goodfellow, Hinton, Schimdhuber, LeCun, et al. are definitely designing architectures, they aren't doing any more data engineering than normal MLEs, like me do... They clearly enjoy designing "algos", and the world clearly respects them greatly for that expertise. Also calling it "algo" design is incredibly reductive. Afterall everyone knows LLMs were discovered when Hinton invented the Boltzmann machine decades ago. This Transformer is just a paltry, fetish, "algo". The Data Engineering in Boltzmann machines was just too primitive!!!
But obviously you must have a far deeper understanding of ML/AI, why don't you quite your day job and start an AGI company? Put your clever prose and subtle insults to work on something more real. Maybe you can compete with ScaleAI, they do data engineering. Definitely the top AI research company.
I see you took this pretty personally.
All I have to say is that top AI research companies (not ScaleAI) are already doing data engineering (expansively understood to include training signal source) and this is the most well-guarded part of the stack, everything else they share more willingly. Data curation, curricula, and yes, human annotation are a giant chunk of what they do. I've seen Anthropic RLHF data, it's very labor intensive and it instantly becomes clear why Sonnet is so much better than its competitors.
Really glad for them and the world.
Past glory is no evidence of current correctness, however. LeCun with his «AR-LLMs suck» has made himself a lolcow, so has Schimidhuber. Hochreiter has spent the last few years trying to one-up the Transformer and fell to the usual «untuned baseline» issue, miserably. Meta keeps churning out papers on architectures; they got spooked by DeepSeek V3 which architecture section opens with «The basic architecture of DeepSeek-V3 is still within the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) framework» and decided to rework the whole Llama 4 stack. Tri Dao did incredibly hard work with Mamba 1/2 and where is Mamba? In models that fall apart on any long context eval more rigorous than NIAH. Google published Griffin/Hawk because it's not valuable enough to hide. What has Hinton done recently, Forward-Forward? Friston tried his hand at this with EBMs and seems to have degraded into pure grift. Shazeer's last works are just «transformers but less attention» and it works fine. What's Goodfellow up to? More fundamental architecture search is becoming the domain of mentally ill 17yo twitter anons.
The most significant real advances in it are driven by what you also condescendingly dismiss – «low-level Cuda compiler writing and server orchestration», or rather hardware-aware Transformer redesigns for greater scalability and unit economics, see DeepSeek's NSA paper.
Transformer training is easy to parallelize and it's expressive enough. Incentives to find anything substantially better increase by OOM year on year, so does the compute and labor spent on it, to no discernible result. I think it's time to let go of faulty analogies and accept the most likely reality.
That tends to happen when you insult people out of the blue Dase. This:
Is called being an asshole. I do ML for a living, insinuating my competence is mediocre because we disagree intellectually is poor taste. There are ways to have this discussion intellectually without resorting to being a douche. The last AI thread you commented on you were a prick to everyone who disagreed with you, up and down the thread. I have no desire to put up with your shit. Call it taking it personally or giving what was given. It's up to you if you want to be an adult and have conversation or be a bratty child.
This was heavy sarcasm on my part. ScaleAI did OpenAIs data engineering but I don't think that makes them a top AI company. data engineering is needed and important! But it's not revolutionary. Data engineering, is the same as its always been.
This is why arguing with laymen is annoying. Low level is not "condensation" it is the technical term for "low on the compute stack" or "closer to the compiler". It's very important, the theories I have heard is that it's one of Deepseek's great winning points for why they were able to train their LLM much cheaper than everyone else. They were willing to go even more low level than the Cuda and write their own firmware-level orchestration code.
We agree.
Schmidhuber has always been a lolcow, he's an inside joke. Any other ML person knows his schtick and finds it funny and doesn't take him seriously. I included it as a humorous inside joke.
At the same time someone who has actually contributed to the field, who is in the arena, infinitely outweighs a nobody posting hot takes on an obscure forum. Regardless of my humor on Schmidhuber, even he, far out weights me as a titan in the ML field because he has contributed groundbreaking research. Where does that leave you? Jeering in the audience like its a sporting match?
Won a nobel prize.
Don't quote the old magic to me I was there when it was written. You seem to be labouring on the delusion that LLMs == ML/AI. LLMs are a subset of ML/AI. The current hottest topic definitely! The this "Algo Fetish" you say goes far beyond just LLMs. The research on model architectures has lead us to the encoder/decoder, then self attention, then Transformers. It's not a fetish and its not mediocre because it's not going to stop at transformers. Maybe you've forgotten a fundamental tenet of the Scientific Theory, but experiments fail. It sounds like you've just listed a bunch of experiments that failed. Should we give up and go on praising on the altar of bronze because no one has figured out how to forge iron? Seems like you are asking us to praise ignorance over discovery?
The problem is transformer's don't work on everything, and the whole field isn't just LLMs. That's the reality.
I'm not sure I believe AGI will come from transformers. If you want to have this as a separate discussion. You can let me know, nicely and we can talk about it.
Likewise my entire point, before you jumped into insult me, is that the Big Names in ML/AI are "fetishy algo freaks" They shockingly don't want to do non "mediocre algo butt sniffing" work. And Data Engineering isn't new, it isn't revolutionary, it's great, it works well, but it doesn't require some 1% ML researcher to pull it off. It requires a solid engineering team, some technical know-how, and a willingness to get your hands dirty. But no one is going to get famous doing it. It's an engineering task not a research task. And since research tasks are what people pay the ludicrously big bucks for at tech companies the engineers at xAI aren't being paid some massive king-sized salary...
As an exercise, can you tell me THE engineer at Deepseek who proposed or wrote their Parallel Thread Execution(PTX) code with a citation?
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Maybe they do for you, but I have higher expectations of success for companies ran by Elon Musk, and value them accordingly.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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, which is why I said that these ranges are irrelevant, and only there to satisfy California labor law, because equity is what matters.
I'm not really sure what your disagreement with me is then other than risk appetite and investment value. 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. Part of that is equity so the likely take home is lower. It's not enough to retire early or live like kings or really any of the grandiose claims made up thread that I originally responded to...
Thanks I'll take that rhetorical trick under consideration. However something can be worthless at the moment and theoretically still be worth more latter. It entirely will depend on the individuals estimation of its long term payoff and the time horizon on which they want a return on it.
I would assert that to me personally, equity in xAI earned from working there is not valuable to me for a number of reasons that are beyond monetary. If I was like you and could purchase it on a private exchange I also might.
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 likely do value stock that I make as part of compensation much less than stock I buy as investment. I'd say my time horizon for a return is much shorter. That's just my preference for compensation. It's not better, it definitely has lost me money before but at some level money has lesser importance to me. 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.
Well, let's go back to how this exchange began, maybe that will help clarify things. I said:
You then replied:
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.
Let me then helpfully quote yet again my original post:
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.
I largely agree with all of this.
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.
I did not mean for this to be a cheap shot so if it came across as one, I apologize. You could straight up say that, yes you too, are an MLE in this field, so it is also a consideration for you. That's not doxing, I'd take that at a face value statement, honor system. No proof needed until proven otherwise.
That said as far as cheap shots you seem to like giving as good as you get... Let's take the spice level down.
Then we agree on this...
We disagree on this, because they aren't taking home any more money. This is still entirely dependent on whether or not xAI IPOs or provides a vehicle to sell their equity. Currently it doesn't sound like there is a plan to do so. The stock rising might be a great sign, but shit happens and if xAI kicks it tomorrow then they didn't actually make all that extra money. Counting it now is counting chickens before they hatch.
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