Genuinely curious: How do you come to that conclusion? What is the output he produced at OpenAI and how do you measure its value?

He opened up two subfields of AI, GANs and adversarial attacks, and coauthored one of the most recommended books. His fame attracts more researchers and for lower salary, just to work with him.

GANs (which he invented) are a game changer, and have enabled things to be built which I thought were 20 years away.

For example, the life-like faces NVidia research created in Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation[1] are just an incredible achievement (it's worth looking at the pics in that paper if you haven't seen them).

Approaches like that have real-life impact in things like games, architecture, design, film, etc (and that is just the obvious implications for images). GANs of course can be used outside images and they have just as much potential there.

Anywhere an auto-encoder is used now can probably be done better with a GAN.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.10196

he's at Google now, probably because they offered him way more

*was, and that 800K wasn't for a full year.