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Also known as unbalanced concentration of wealth, which is what tech has been enabling at a faster and faster pace for the last 25 years.


This is probably a deconcentration event.

Rich people with a lot of money giving said money to smart working class nerds that happened to be hired by OpenAI.


How anyone can assume that the employment demographic of OpenAI is made up of "smart working class nerds" is beyond me.

They hire top talent with regards to AI and AI research. I'd wager a majority of them are less working class and more smart, trained, academic nerds with an unreal amount of PhD's in the mix.


very likely the majority of them have to work for a living, hence "working class"

many are probably immigrants as well

edit: according to Wikipedia, some people use "middle class" for white-collar workers


We would need to know more about the demographic of said people.

These shares probably end up in pension funds. So in the end it is probably going to be primary school teachers from Minnesota that pays Silicon Valley based software developers.

Unless, however, they continue to create value for the pension funds. For this we will have to wait another 15 years to know.


Top 5% of earners in the US are making $340k USD[0]. Is it unreasonable for people working at OpenAI to get 2-3x that?

If you want to be angry at the unbalanced concentration of wealth, take a look at Bezos[1].

[0] https://www.unbiased.com/discover/banking/how-much-income-pu...

[1] https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/


Why do you feel they deserve that? For making the Internet even more of a wasteland of automated junk?


you really can't see any benefits to the technology they are creating?


No, not really. And certainly not to the degree that the above commenter was assigning. It's just enabling the world to become even more complex.


There's some benefits, but also massive, massive society destroying downsides. In retrospect, the downsides of social media like addiction, social isolation, and political misinformation, radicalization were hand waved away. We were told "THINK OF THE UPSIDE OF SOCIAL MEDIA, THINK OF THE CONNECTIONS" and now think of how isolated and depressed and addicted everyone is now. The exact same thing will happen with AI and VR.


It’s possible to be angry at both!


So now on hackernews the mere act of earning more money than someone else is a sin, especially when it's done by workers creating an entirely new market of products and services that we couldn't have imagined a mere 5 years ago.

I would love to unsubscribe from this particular strain of brainrot that has infested midwit discourse, but it seems to be everywhere.


(Take with a pinch of salt, I don't know economics or social science.)

It seems that even though economic growth raises all ships, just some more than others, inequality causes social unrest even if they were in a better position than before (e.g. having access to new innovations and a higher standard of living).


> the mere act of earning more money than someone else is a sin

It is pretty universal among the animal kingdom https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSryJXDpZo


employees more commonly having equity in the company they work for is quite the opposite of this


People who make things other people want make more money, news at 11.

Sorry to break it to you but a solid 80% of the workforce exists to support the 20% actually creating wealth. Nobody is getting rich driving a truck for Amazon, or building said truck for them. It’s the guy who ordered the truck who’s getting rich.




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