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Mathematicians in academia are paid a little less than AI researchers. Companies are willing to pay billions to steal the few people capable of driving development of frontier LLMs from each other. Cryptographers don't quite enjoy the same popularity.


Does getting paid more make people smarter?

Especially academia tend to do their work out of interest, their monetary gain isn't their primary goal


When people with a particular aptitude and skillset can make 10x as much money doing job A than job B, there is a bias towards job A.

Of course, that doesn’t mean nobody will do job B for other, non-financial reasons.




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