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

nytimes.com

61–70 of 194 posts

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

#61
Wow... what a hyped up clickbait article! If you are a top performer in virtually any field in the world, you are likely making 10X than average norms. It doesn’t mean everyone is getting 10X. To get $1M in AI field you will need to have PhD from top institute, probably under well known adviser, might have even written a book, published award winning papers at top conferences and so on. It’s a big list and there are likely less than dozen people would qualify. And yes, they do deserve 10X income.

It’s not that author doesn’t know this. He even tries to protect himself by making sure facts are included:

At DeepMind, a London A.I. lab now owned by Google, costs for 400 employees totaled $138 million in 2016, according to the company’s annual financial filings in Britain. That translates to $345,000 per employee, including researchers and other staff.

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

#62
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) c…

[deleted]

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

#64

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...

> Because nonprofits, like other businesses, ...

Or, more accurately, non-profits are businesses.

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

#65
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why does a payment gateway need deep learning? I can't imagine an online betting system doing fraud detection on deposits.

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

#66
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…

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

>Otherwise they might as well not know how to do it.

This is some real crazy talk here. The idea that you should limit yourself to the particular set of knowledge you wish to make money off of is insane.

There's almost no such thing as wasted learning, even if you're not interested in pursuing it for a career. Maybe it's a hobby, maybe you touch it in a tangential way for your normal work where a basic understanding brings value but is not necessary.

This is the same attitude that undervalues previous experience and builds in favor of specific lingual or stack competence.

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

#69

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…

From what I've seen, away from the coasts between $70k - $100k.

PhD adds about 25k-40k to the figure, depending on industry.

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

#70
post #53

"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.

So by what value is market-value determined then?

If X is willing to pay Y the value is Y.

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