[levanten]

Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money.

Also 10m would be a drop in the bucket compared to being a shareholder of a company that has achieved AGI; you could also imagine the influence and fame that comes with it.

[blululu]

Kind of a sucker move here since you personally will 100% be forgotten. We are only going to remember one or two people who did any of this. Say Sam Altman and Ilya Sttsveker. Everyone else will be forgotten. The authors or the Transformer paper are unlikely to make it into the history books or even popular imagination. Think about the Manhattan Project. We recently made a movie remembering that one guy who did something on the Manhattan Project, but he will soon fade back into obscurity. Sometimes people say that it was about Einstein's theory of relativity. The only people who know who folks like Ulam were are physicists. The legions of technicians who made it all come together are totally forgotten. Same with the space program or the first computer or pretty much any engineering marvel.

[cdrini]

Well depends on what you value. Achieving/contributing to something impactful first is for many people valuable even if it doesn't come with fame. Historically, this mindframe has been popular especially amongst scientists.

[impossiblefork]

Personally I think the ones who will be remembered will be the ones who publish useful methods first, not the ones who succeed commercially.

It'll be Vaswani and the others for the transformer, then maybe Zelikman and those on that paper for thought tokens, then maybe some of the RNN people and word embedding people will be cited as pioneers. Sutskever will definitely be remembered for GPT-1 though, being first to really scale up transformers. But it'll actually be like with flight and a whole mass of people will be remembered, just as we now remember everyone from the Wrights to Bleriot and to Busemann, Prandtl, even Whitcomb.

[skybrian]

"The grass is greener elsewhere" isn't inconsistent with a belief that AGI will happen somewhere.

It means you don't have much faith that the company you're working at will be the ones to pull it off.

[fragmede]

With a salary of $10m/year, handwave roughly half of that goes to taxes, you'd be making just shy of $100k post-tax per week. Call me a sellout, but goddamn. For that much money, there's a lot of places I could be convinced to put my faith into that I wouldn't otherwise.

[raincole]

> Being part of the team that achieved AGI first would be to write your name in history forever. That could mean more to people than money.

Uh, sure. How many rocket engineers who worked for moon landing could you name?

[krainboltgreene]

How many new species of infinite chattel slave did they invent?

[tharkun__]

*some people