"The people spreading obvious lies must have a reasonable basis in their lying"?
I have known several people who have went to OAI and I would firmly say they are 10x engineers, but they are just doing general infra stuff that all large tech companies have to do, so I wouldn’t say they are solving problems that only they can solve and nobody else.
Nobody wants to hear that one dev can be 50x better, but it's obvious that everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses and not every mind is replaceable.
Doesn't it depend upon how you measure the 50x? If hiring five name-brand AI researchers gets you a billion dollars in funding, they're probably each worth 1,000x what I'm worth to the business.
Adding headcount to a fast growing company *to lower wages* is a sure way to kill your culture, lower the overall quality bar and increase communication overheads significantly.
Yes they are paying a lot of their employees and the pool will grow, but adding bodies to a team that is running well in hopes that it will automatically lead to a bump in productivity is the part that is insane. It never works.
What will happen is a completely new team (team B) will be formed and given ownership of a component that was previously owned by team A under the guise of "we will just agree on interfaces". Team B will start doing their thing and meeting with Team A representative regularly but integration issues will still arise, except that instead of a tight core of 10-20 developers, you now have 40. They will add a ticketing to track change better, now issues in Team's B service, which could have been addressed in an hour by the right engineer on team A, will take 3 days to get resolved as ticket get triaged/prioritized. Lo and behold, Team C as now appeared and will be owning a sub-component of Team B. Now when Team A has issue with Team B's service, they cut a ticket, but the oncall on Team B investigates and finds that it's actually an issue with Team C's service, they cut their own ticket.
Suddenly every little issue takes days and weeks to get resolved because the original core of 10-20 developers is no longer empowered to just move fast. They eventually leave because they feel like their impact and influence has diminished (Team C's manager is very good at politics), Team A is hollowed out and you now have wall-to-wall mediocrity with 120 headcounts and nothing is ever anyone's fault.
I had a director that always repeated that communication between N people is inherently N² and thus hiring should always weight in that the candidate being "good" is not enough, they have to pull their weight and make up for the communication overhead that they add to the team.
In any case the talent is very scarce in AI/ML, the one able to push through good ideas so prices are going to be high for years.
As for your various anecdotes later, I offer the counter observation that nobody is going around talking about 50x lottery winners, despite the lifetime earnings on lotteries also showing very wide spread:. Clearly observing a big spread in outcome is insufficient evidence for concluding the spread is due to factors inherent to the participants.
Besides, people are actively being trained up. Some labs are just extending offers to people who score very highly on their conscription IQ tests.
Why would employees stay after getting trained if they have a better offer?
You may lose a few employees to poaching, sure - but the math on the relative cost to hire someone for 100m vs. training a bunch employees and losing a portion of those is pretty strongly in your favor.
