Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 194 posts

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

#41

Post by chatmasta »

tedsanders wrote: post #32

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…

It seems more akin to building a labor war chest, i.e. filling your company with the best AI talent so that your competition can not hire them. You might not have an exact plan for what to do now, but there's no reason not to build up a talented team of engineers in a hot field when you've got effectively unlimited money and resources.

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

#42

Post by GFischer »

malux85 wrote: post #7
miketery wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What qualifications or degrees do these people posses?

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)

So I can do 800 credit card transactions a second I should get a 100x raise? I knew I was underpaid, but not that much ! :P

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

#44

Post by nvarsj »

charlesdm wrote: post #28
miketery wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What qualifications or degrees do these people posses?

Degrees don't matter. (Business focused) results and a track record of delivering do. Still impressive remuneration though -- he must be adding tens of millions in profits to the bottom line.

And/or good at convincing people he provides that much value.

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

#45

Post by derefr »

aje403 wrote: post #38
derefr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True, but they probably are worth more to their own companies—especially mid-sized companies—than those companies realize. Whether or not the market would pay more for them, more money could certainly be being made off their backs (as with the “administrative assistant” roles at medium-sized companies that often end up substituting for much of the role of HR, PR copywriting, office management and often even team coordination. All for the cost of a secretary!+)

Not harnessing these untapped assets you already possess is a failure for a company, in much the same way that not shaving cost centers or negotiating purchases would be.

+ Yes, I’m trying to hint here that one would be crazy to allow oneself to be exploited in this manner. If you truly have the ability to do these additional jobs, then you should be applying for roles that explicitly, rather than implicitly, use those skills, and offer compensation for them. Sadly—for the same reason many people find it hard to negotiate salary—many people won’t try for jobs that no one has told them they’re “allowed” to apply for.

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

#48

Post by make3 »

blackbagboys wrote: post #23

So a tiny handful of top performers - plausibly few enough that you could fit them all on a schoolbus - in an ultra-hot technical field are raking in huge sums, for the moment. Unless you are a top professor at an R1 research university or have a PhD from an R1 university studying under the other top minds in the field or are otherwise in the most elite fraction of the profession, it doesn't sound like this is partic…

They say that OpenAI are forced to disclose the salaries. Does anyone have a link to the source, to the document with the disclosed salaries? I'd be curious to see the range.

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

#49

Post by badminton1 »

Some occupations such as football players or C-level executives make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

I am not surprised that an AI researcher can make that much.

Consider the AI researchers behind the optical recognition systems for handwritten text used in ATMs. Now you can massively deploy ATMs that read checks 24/7 without supervision... Paying $1m 2018 dollars to those guys is not a proportional compensation with respect to the amount of wealth they brought in.

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

#50

Post by aje403 »

derefr wrote: post #45
aje403 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True, but they probably are worth more to their own companies —especially mid-sized companies—than those companies realize. Whether or not the market would pay more for them, more money could certainly be being made off their backs (as with the “administrative assistant” roles at medium-sized companies that often end up substituting for much of the role of HR, PR copywriting, office management and often even team coo…

That’s correct, but the pragmatic reality of most companies and data science with respect to internal politics and other bullshit is that they’re not going to find that mobility even if they network internally
Post reply on HN