OpenAI and Anthropic are explicitly trying to build autonomous, recursively self-improving AI.
So why are they still paying up for world-class humans like Noam Shazeer and John Jumper?
Nobody's disclosed what OpenAI and Anthropic paid them. But we do know this: Google paid $2.7B two years ago to bring Shazeer back. Noam is at OpenAI now anyway. Forget Shohei Ohtani money. This is beyond any athlete.
Why pay that, when the whole goal is AI that improves itself?
Because these guys are the human state of the art.
Shazeer co-wrote "Attention Is All You Need," the paper that birthed the Transformer architecture. Jumper won a Nobel Prize for AlphaFold. You don't get more SoTA than that.
AI models are really more intellect than intelligence. I love what they can do, and they help me every day. But human beings have something different. Human beings have true intelligence. It's an alive thing.
Humans set the frame with our intelligence. The autonomous AI works inside the frame, with their intellect.
And human frame-setting is NOT going anywhere. Because it was never about mere intellect.
It's about true intelligence and true intelligence is about engaging with life in the here and now. It's an alive thing.