this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2026
153 points (88.8% liked)
Technology
88872 readers
3548 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You clearly have no idea how much ai engineers are paid, and even less of an idea how their stock options are priced.
What are you talking about. The engineers the ground level folk that a developing this stuff yes they're paid highly but they're not millionaires by any stretch in the imagination. Building a system that will crash the entire economic system of the Earth is not beneficial to them.
The average salary of the 60+ people left at character.ai is $1m, according to the news about disney buying them. Even a bankrupt one can make millionaires.
The hundreds, perhaps thousands of people working on ai are millionaires. I dont know that being a millionaire is a great sign of anything anymore, but theyll have done it with just a few years of work.
At a 2tr$ targeted valuation (yes that number is silly but it's also the IPO target) 1$mil is only a .05% equity stake and engineers usually get .1-.2%
Only if they divest. Which they can't really do because it isn't actually clear that the shares will increase in value long-term in fact dive into shares would put a scare on the market.
But that's not really my point, my point is if the AI completely collapses the financial system then by its definition a lot of money isn't really going to motivate people not as they truly believed money would become worthless.
The main engineers buildings this stuff are millionaires. They’ve been making probably $400k on the low end and we know of salaries over a million on the high end.
Still not enough to survive an actual world collapse though.