Maybe this isn't the same as the eight figure comp they'd get at Meta when they did their hiring spree, but no one thinks that's sustainable.
I don't get the impression that the difference between one company succeeding to build SOTA LLMs, and another struggling, comes down to individual employees - it seems to be more about the organization itself and their ability to manage teams and projects of this type. No doubt there are a few rockstars generating huge value, such as Noam Shazeer had been, but they are the exceptions.
When DeepMind was first created, before Google acquired it, they were famous for the high salaries, especially for the UK, but this was an assemblage of the brightest and best PhDs, expected to be solving challenging research problems along the unknown path to AGI. Many of these original employees may still be there, but it seems their job and value proposition has changed - are they any more capable, or key to, helping Gemini catch up with the competition than some "rank and file" employee familiar with LLMs? And if so, why haven't they done it?
I'm honestly not sure about that. They need a decent LLM to fight off the threat of LLMs replacing search, but I'd say that Gemini 3.6 Flash is more than good enough for that, with a smaller/cheaper model being preferred to a larger one. If you are "searching" for a proof to the Jacobian conjecture, then try Fable, and I doubt Google will miss the advertising revenue if Anthropic manage to sell Terrance Tao a pair of socks.
More to the point, DeepMind seems to have become a product division charged with building LLMs, not a blue sky research institute chasing AGI. To the extent that continued LLM improvement is important to Google, the relevant question is how much do you need to pay for a competent ML/LLM developer?
>you sound like an MBA
Well, no - techie here.
I wasn't sure if you were suggesting that DeepMind should pay more just because people developing LLMs at other companies are paid more, or because these are elite DeepMind researchers and are objectively worth more than other Google developers. My point being that it seems they are no longer being used as elite researchers - they are LLM developers. Does Meta need to pay FAANG salaries to employees that have been repurposed as data labellers?