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A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

nytimes.com

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Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#51

Post by neuralsp »

joshvm wrote: post #10
alphagrep12345 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a couple of questions - - Would you say that you'd have got an AI researcher position without a Ph.D.? - Also, why is NEURIPS or ICML papers is not a hiring guarantee? I thought they're highly sought after.

> Would you say that you'd have got an AI researcher position without a Ph.D.? It's difficult to get any true researcher position without a PhD. It doesn't mean that PhD has to be in AI. Research involves a lot of reading and writing papers, which a PhD is supposedly training you how to do. That said most places will say "equivalent practical experience" and it's entirely possible to be competent in AI/ML without a P…

>I did a PhD in space science, I now do machine learning in ecology and spent the summer working on machine learning for disaster management.

Do you think it is possible to that without any background in anything? I mean could someone apply black box frameworks without understanding them. How would they be caught?

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#53

Post by ryacko »

jorblumesea wrote: post #19

Serious question, is this value justified? I don't have any contact with AI development or AI researchers. Do they really bring that much value to the business? It makes sense that for Google, these positions would have almost unlimited clean data. But many companies are not Google.

I don't think AT&T made much from Bell Labs.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#54

Post by scarejunba »

m0zg wrote: post #41
jorblumesea wrote: post #19

Serious question, is this value justified? I don't have any contact with AI development or AI researchers. Do they really bring that much value to the business? It makes sense that for Google, these positions would have almost unlimited clean data. But many companies are not Google.

How do you define "justified"? The field is so new, someone who really knows what they're doing could mean a difference between a large team spending years and getting nowhere remarkable, and improving state of the art every 6 months. With the same exact team. So would you rather get nothing for your money, or something valuable every 6-9 months? That's the question. These people are typically hired after trying pret…

I think he's asking if these people produce positive marginal value to the company. The answer is usually yes.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#55

Post by toast0 »

ryanSrich wrote: post #47
ModernMech wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200k in the bay area is like $90k where I'm from. It's a decent living, but if you've got a family it's not exactly upper class.

If you have a family it’s not possible. Home prices average close to $1m. You’d have to save an entire years salary PRE tax to afford the down payment. That will take years and years to save. If you’re raising a family you’ll likely need two $200k incomes to afford a house, and even then, it’ll take at least 2 years to save for the down payment. The Bay Area is for college kids and millionaires. That’s it.

20% down is a rule of thumb, and a requirement to avoid mortgage insurance, but it is not a requirement for lending.

My credit union will do loans of up to 95% loan to value for $1.5M to first time homeowners or 90% loan to value up to $1.5M if you don't meet the first time qualifications. [1] I'm sure other volume lenders in the bay area have similar lending standards and programs.

[1] https://www.starone.org/first-time-home-buyer/

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#56

Post by scottlegrand2 »

7-figure salaries have been a thing for quite a while at Facebook, Google and definitely at hedge funds. Right now, you can make a half million a year or more if you're willing to optimize the low-level code in any of the major AI frameworks.

If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain. You don't have to be in the 0.001% just the top 5%. That's hard work but it's doable.

The only thing that's remotely fungible in AI is python-based data scientists who can do little more than port new data to existing models open sourced on GitHub. And even then they do pretty well because of the huge demand.

I don't see that changing anytime soon. I believe expecting automated systems to replace data scientists is the same level of naivete as believing we'd reach L5 autonomy in a few years in 2014.

Anthony Lewandowski was making 120 million dollars a year when he left Waymo. If you're an AI expert in the valley and you're not making at least $500k, you are one job hop away from doing so if you play your cards remotely right.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#57

Post by candiodari »

puranjay wrote: post #44
xenocyon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it's not unusual for star professionals in other fields to make that much at nonprofits. E.g. neurosurgeons can often make that much at nonprofit hospitals. And if one gets into executive comp at a large nonprofit, a million a year is no big deal. But there is a large variance in the nonprofit world, and it's more common for a PhD in CS to earn something like $60K at research nonprofits. Other nonprofit employe…

Star *anything" is a path to millions. Star athletes and musicians are obvious examples, but even star jugglers or puppeteers probably make a killing. Very misleading article

Exactly. The problem with this field is that if you want to see what you'd have to do to be a star researcher in AI. You'd have to be top-10 amongst 20.000 or so machine learning PhDs. This is not a reasonable aspiration. Plus I would argue that although Ilya Sutskever did a ridiculous amount of effort and then got lucky, 2 two others were at best interested academics on the sidelines for most of their careers, then got lucky with a grad student. There's at least 1000 who did similar effort to Ilya (let's say half as much, which is still triple what any reasonable person would find reasonable), way more than the 2 other named examples, yet have no hope at all of ever achieving his level of recognition, including several of the students who really did most of the work the 2 others got recognition for.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#58

Post by nostrademons »

ryanSrich wrote: post #47
ModernMech wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200k in the bay area is like $90k where I'm from. It's a decent living, but if you've got a family it's not exactly upper class.

If you have a family it’s not possible. Home prices average close to $1m. You’d have to save an entire years salary PRE tax to afford the down payment. That will take years and years to save. If you’re raising a family you’ll likely need two $200k incomes to afford a house, and even then, it’ll take at least 2 years to save for the down payment. The Bay Area is for college kids and millionaires. That’s it.

It's certainly possible. You just don't own a home, you rent. It's much like NYC in that regard - you don't own a detached home in NYC regardless of how rich you are, you rent a swanky loft or penthouse. At most you might buy a condo, but you can still find plenty of hedge fund managers or Google engineers that rent their permanent residence (and sometimes have over $1M in liquid assets).

In my wife's mom's group (which had a number of dual-tech-income couples working for places like Apple, Google, Palantir, Facebook, etc.), not a single parent owned their own home. I live in a small 13-unit townhome complex, and about 8 of the units have families with young kids.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#59

Post by hogFeast »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #2

How replicable is this thing? Looking from a monetary perspective, is it worth getting a Ph.D. in AI? Assuming you like both academic research and working in the industry, if you were to make a choice whether to do a Ph.D. or not, how would you make it?

If you want to earn money, create the most revenue.

The problem that most technical people seem to have is that they think a qualification is a licence to print money. It isn't. The majority of people who obtain qualifications have no idea how to make money (that is why they are doing the qualification rather than making money, and this effect increases with the complexity of the course of study).

So if you want to make money and your interest is AI, sure do a PhD...but at some point, you are going to have to work out how you can use those skills to sell something.

I think, at some point, there is going to be a rude awakening. Right now, we this situation where you can tap up some VC idiot to pay your salary for a few years whilst you fuck about on some bullshit. You can get acquired by some megacorp with a ton of cash and have no accountability from shareholders while you light huge stacks of their cash on fire...this always ends. Always.

You are either a bureaucrat chasing qualifications to get no-accountability jobs or you are someone that can create value for other people. I am not knocking any kind of advanced degree (I have one). But the point of it is not money.

So even posing the question is totally misguided.

Re: A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit

#60

Post by [deleted] »

scarejunba wrote: post #54
m0zg wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "justified"? The field is so new, someone who really knows what they're doing could mean a difference between a large team spending years and getting nowhere remarkable, and improving state of the art every 6 months. With the same exact team. So would you rather get nothing for your money, or something valuable every 6-9 months? That's the question. These people are typically hired after trying pret…

I think he's asking if these people produce positive marginal value to the company. The answer is usually yes.

[deleted]
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