A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit • Hacker News Board

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#31

Post by malux85 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

tzakrajs wrote: post #20

malux85 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's experience in the two examples I gave : I singlehandedly built my company : RAMM Science ( https://ramm.science ) And he singlehandedly built one of Europes largest online betting system backends (and scaled it to 800 transactions a second using Deep Learning, Kafka and a Hadoop cluster)

Is 800 transactions per second good? It seems like a low number but what do I know. I am impressed that Europe's largest betting system only does 800 transactions per second.

That's 800 credit card transactions a second --- thats people making deposits into their accounts to bet with. (btw I think that's peak - I'm not 100% sure)

The frontends (where the casino / betting games run) do a lot more than this, but they work against the balance in the account, it's the payment gateway that's doing 800/s

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#32

Post by tedsanders » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

Genuine questions for those participating in this market (on either side):

-How is the performance of $1M AI researchers measured? Like, at their six month review, what do you look at to tell if your money is being well spent?

-How do you tell if it makes more sense to hire 1 famous AI researcher vs 10 additional junior data scientists? What sort of products are suited to different hiring strategies?

-How much of $1M AI researcher hiring is long-term/speculative (i.e., based on hopes of future products/revenue) vs short-term/measurable (immediately measurable as soon as a code commit hits the product)? Are there examples of products where profit went up by millions after a famous AI researcher was hired?

It sounds like quite a few companies are grappling with these questions today. I'm really curious to know how their thinking is evolving on this topic.

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#33

Post by einstok » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

malux85 wrote: post #2

Not unusual for people at the top of their game. I just turned down a 2M a year offer, and I have a friend who is making 2.9M USD. It's just a value proposition, he makes the company a lot more than 2.9 million a year, and when you negotiate you negotiate on value (and not on time) then you can justify these salaries.

Fake it till you make it dude

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#34

Post by xiaolingxiao » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:04 PM UTC

not_a_moth wrote: post #14

To be clear a few AI researchers are making more than $1M, and the "even at a nonprofit" is referring to arguably the most famous AI shop out there. Source: work in AI.

what's your background and what is the general compensation of those around you?

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#35

Post by sjg007 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #21

The top players in a field with a lot of commercial potential can claim high salaries, even for doing quasi-academic research mostly on things they want to research. That said, I'm reminded the champion of the effective altruism movement made his name arguing that charities ought to rigorously audit their efficiency in turning donations into results before recommending $30m of foundation cash went to this particular…

OpenAI is funded by a few VCs and big name tech leaders. It got to be a research incubator and pay well otherwise everyone will go off to a big tech company. To some extent they can focus on research as directed by the board as well. Otherwise you wait for academics to publish something OR for people to leave the big techs.

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#36

Post by mehrdadn » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #30

mmartinson wrote: post #11

"Mr. Zaremba said big tech companies were offering him two or three times what he believed his real market value was" Seems this fellow knows a whole lot more about computers than he does markets hahaha

He might be trying to say that there are enough people like him in the market that it really shouldn't be a seller's market; but those others are mostly undervalued/ignored, while his value has been artificially inflated because of the (incorrectly!) perceived rarity of his skills. This is the pattern that goes on all the time inside companies: constant attempts to hire talent from the outside, coupled with complete…

Do they want to be doing data science though? Otherwise they might as well not know how to do it.

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#37

Post by microtherion » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

Who do these people think they are anyway? College football coaches?

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#38

Post by aje403 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:11 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #30

mmartinson wrote: post #11

"Mr. Zaremba said big tech companies were offering him two or three times what he believed his real market value was" Seems this fellow knows a whole lot more about computers than he does markets hahaha

He might be trying to say that there are enough people like him in the market that it really shouldn't be a seller's market; but those others are mostly undervalued/ignored, while his value has been artificially inflated because of the (incorrectly!) perceived rarity of his skills. This is the pattern that goes on all the time inside companies: constant attempts to hire talent from the outside, coupled with complete…

I think there are a lot of deep learning dilettentes, and a large number of them on HN, overestimating their abilities relative to the experts being hired by google. The guy who is stuck doing dev ops but can be doing data science is not the 1mm+ guy at google even though some of them find it hard to accept

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#39

Post by mythbuster2001 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:13 PM UTC

I'm not sure anything that came out from OpenAI so far, justifies that sort of compensation... Maybe they have some aces up their sleeves...

Re: A.I. Researchers Are Making More Than $1M, Even at a Nonprofit

#40

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

mmartinson wrote: post #11

"Mr. Zaremba said big tech companies were offering him two or three times what he believed his real market value was" Seems this fellow knows a whole lot more about computers than he does markets hahaha

Perhaps a more charitable explanation: Mr. Zaremba has expert knowledge of statistical analysis and hence what his true value is (in terms of return on his salary, and in comparison to other equivalent candidates). The current market, though, is essentially in a "bubble" for AI candidates, and so is mispricing the actual value of this "asset".