Here's one last set of AI charts for the year. We'll have more in 2025.
The US has a huge lead over everyone else. Why? Maybe because of this:
Is this cause or effect? Do we have a thriving AI industry because we attract all the best people with sky-high salaries? Or do we pay sky-high salaries because our AI industry is thriving? Hmmm.
In any case, it sure looks like I should go back to being a product manager.
Cool. Cool cool cool. So we can light enormous piles of money on fire for dead-end AI products that have no current and very little future claim to profitability. OpenAI spends two and a half dollars for every dollar they bring in and there's no sign of that cost curve flipping anytime soon.
Ed Zitron is right. We live in a degenerate Rot Economy, and when the next AI Winter arrives its going to be absolutely murderous.
Exactly this.
Tulip mania but make it use more electricity than a medium-sized country.
Digging ditches and filling them in still pays the same.
Eh, I would ignore this particular choice of comp data: tech pay for strong engineers is dominated by stock grants, and this is even more extreme in AI (where it’s all Big Tech & startups). Anyone looking at this thinking AI people are making 200k is waaaaaaay off.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36460082
Also: note that there are not *that* many frontier models. Those teams don’t add up to hundreds of thousands of engineers — so average compensation numbers don’t say much about how/whether those teams are being compensated.
But the point stands: North American universities were leaders in modern AI, and US big tech has paid (insane) compensation for a decade now. None of these folks are headed elsewhere — Google spent unbelievable amounts on AI before the latest explosion.
Yeah, in regards to Silicon Valley, that chart is very wrong. Salaries really are different here.
I've worked on the tech side of startups here since the 90s. I'm currently an engineering manager, we are not an "AI" company, and have people on my team who make more than the "senior exec" US average. (I also manage people who make more than me; this happens fairly frequently, too.) And we pay significantly under what the big players do - we can't compete on raw money.
SV salaries are really singular. The talent competition is very fierce.
I am very grateful that, if AI is going to be ubiquitous in the future as seems inevitable, that it's likely to be AI trained on American data so that it has a pretty "normal" [in the statistical meaning] diatribution of thought and reaction.
Chinese AI is going to make good little apparatchiks. Yes, US data will create a lot of assholes, but some people will use it to solve real problems.
Well, if Muskrat and the claque from Pay Pal will shut up and let the real smart folks make something good that is.
In what sense is the United States "normal". I continually see charts showing that it is an outlier in MANY respects.
There’s even a whole book about this: the WEIRDest people in the world. Psychology as a field has huge issues because almost all its data has come from white Americans.
US salaries for PMC jobs are high across the board relative to other rich countries. Tech jobs are no exception.
It’s all those H1-B visas
No, no it's not?
But isn't AI supposed to eliminate those jobs?
Exactly.
AI can't exactly eliminate the jobs of people making better or implementing AI.
Let's be just a little cautious here. The greatest number and the greatest quality are not the same thing. Especially since Silicon Valley has a long history of over-hyping their successes.
Wait. Wouldn't the salaries be even higher if they weren't being dragged down by those evil H1-Bs living off our largesse?
It just wouldn't be possible to do without H1Bs.
We hire more engineers than we train, including foreign born students.
Ahhh, all those big brains coding themselves out of their jobs. Wonder when they’ll start to realize that and then turn to undermining the AI industry? Too late by then!