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

51–60 of 194 posts

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

#51

Post by notahacker »

sjg007 wrote: post #35
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.

Oh I don't doubt OpenAI is more likely to produce useful research if can keep hold of staff. Mostly I was reminded of the people in the HN thread [1] at the time suggesting it didn't pay well, when actually it's picking up elite researchers on elite salaries and hoping something will come of it.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008569

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

#52

Post by bob_theslob646 »

chatmasta wrote: post #41
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.

Huh, you seem to be describing Google fairly well...

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

#53

Post by ggg9990 »

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

If Bill Gates takes a fancy to a $100,000 mountain cabin and the owner doesn’t want to sell, he could offer $10 million for it, but that doesn’t increase the market value of the cabin.

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

#54

Post by jseliger »

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…

Also, the "nonprofit" part is less relevant than many assume. Nonprofits are more like businesses than most people realize: http://seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-like-b...

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

#55

Post by opsiprogram »

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.

What is considered to be "top of game" in deep learning in your experience... does that apply to just researchers like Ian Goodfellow who come up with completely novel methods for ML algorithms, or does it extend as far as people who are just using the methods that others developed effectively or in new ways? I know thats a weird question, but I am planning on looking into deep learning jobs after finishing my (MS) curious what the market value is for people who have experience implementing the systems , vs the people inventing new architectures. Because I won't have a PHD... It seems like somewhere along the way its a pretty extreme jump to ask for 1,2M or even 500K instead of just 100K~200K... wondering if you have any advice for how someone new might prove themselves... I guess beyond the standard stuff (have a nice github, try to replicate papers etc...)

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

#57

Post by CretinDesAlpes »

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…

I don't think it works like this. It's a strategic investment for the company to attract talents. People want to work with smarter people than themselves.

Like they say in the article “When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star, You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.”

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

#58

Post by kilbuz »

GFischer wrote: post #42
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)

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

Close. You need to build a product with which 800 people per second want to perform a credit card transaction.

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

#59

Post by gwern »

make3 wrote: post #48
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.

See my comment.

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

#60

Post by tensor »

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.

Results don't really matter either, you just need to convince people that you are valuable. Many people in business don't have any sort of "provable" results but have excellent people skills.
Post reply on HN