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

81–90 of 176 posts

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

#81

Post by mruts »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #71
adambyrtek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scholes & Merton also joined a hedge fund that traded based on their models and cased a financial crash after the Russian bond default in 1998 which their models didn't take into account. Great example of a black swan event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

It's only a black swan event if you pay no attention to geopolitics, which unfortunately banking types don't, at least not beyond WSJ/FT headlines.

A more accurate statement would be that most fund managers care about geopolitics too much, and quants too little.

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

#82

Post by HenryKissinger »

nharada wrote: post #74
HenryKissinger wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain. How does it work in practice? Let's say I just published a major conference paper. Where do I apply for my million dollar job? Who do I reach out to?

You don't know? Usually at NeurIPS and CVPR the applications are next to the tea and coffee they put out in the mornings. Not sure about ICML.

I did not know about these conferences. I googled the first one and found a headline about how tickets sold out in minutes. Is this why? Because everyone attending hopes to get a 6 figures job?

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

#83

Post by nharada »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #82
nharada wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know? Usually at NeurIPS and CVPR the applications are next to the tea and coffee they put out in the mornings. Not sure about ICML.

I did not know about these conferences. I googled the first one and found a headline about how tickets sold out in minutes. Is this why? Because everyone attending hopes to get a 6 figures job?

I'm being facetious, this is not at all true. At my company, we typically look for multiple major publications and you certainly don't get a million dollar job out of it.

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

#84

Post by sdan »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #82
nharada wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know? Usually at NeurIPS and CVPR the applications are next to the tea and coffee they put out in the mornings. Not sure about ICML.

I did not know about these conferences. I googled the first one and found a headline about how tickets sold out in minutes. Is this why? Because everyone attending hopes to get a 6 figures job?

No, even I attended these conferences as a high school student. Attending doesn’t have anything to do with presenting.

Only reason they sell out is because both presenters and researchers who need to keep up with the field try getting tickets.

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

#86

Post by ttlei »

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #56

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…

Did i read that right? 120mils a year?!!!

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

#87

Post by mjn »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #4
high_derivative wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Im an AI researcher at a big tech company. It would have been far wiser financially to start as a software engineer after my Bachelor's. Also, having a few NEURIPS or ICML papers is not a hiring guarantee any more. It's decidedly not 2015-17 any longer. In particular, I feel bad for the people who started their PhDs with $$$ in their eyes around that time. Don't get me wrong, they will all be employable…

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.

> Also, why is NEURIPS or ICML papers is not a hiring guarantee? I thought they're highly sought after.

They're sought after, but the conferences have also grown huge. NeurIPS 2018 accepted around 1,000 papers! Based on a query of the DBLP [1] dataset, there were 4,409 distinct authors who had a paper at either NeurIPS 2018 or ICML 2018 (or both). If you add in a few of the other big AI and ML conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, ICLR), the number grows to 10,995 distinct authors, again solely for the year 2018. The field is hot, but is it hot enough for ten thousand people to be automatically hired because of one paper?

There's also decreasing confidence in the big conferences' review processes I think. NeurIPS 2014 actually did a study to estimate how random acceptance was by assigning some papers to two different sets of reviewers and checking how similar the decisions were [2], and found there was a much higher degree of luck in acceptance/rejection decisions than they had expected. I personally have more confidence in the review processes of smaller and more focused conferences (and journals!), though they don't have the same level of name recognition.

[1] https://dblp.uni-trier.de/

[2] http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html

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

#88

Post by nostrademons »

opportune wrote: post #67
ryanSrich wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a financial mistake to not put 20% down. Not only are you hit with $500+/month in PMI, you have almost negative equity into the house when you buy it. Meaning if you have to sell on short notice you're either completely underwater having to pay back cap gains, or you're just breaking even. That's not an ideal situation and if you don't understand the mechanics going in, you'll find yourself in a world of hurt in…

If you truly don't have the money for the down payment, the math of mortgage+insurance+property taxes+pmi+deductions might still work out to be in your favor over renting

It's pretty unlikely in the Bay Area. There are fairly large distortions in the local market (because of Prop 13, zoning, wealth inequality, and small home supply in general) that usually make renting significantly more affordable than buying in general.

See eg. this $1.9M home (estimated payment $9000/month, not including PMI) vs. this $4900/month equivalent:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/910-San-Marcos-Cir-Mounta...

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/pen/apa?min_bedrooms=3

(Also note that the $1.9M home is currently assessed at $170K, so the current owners are paying < 10% the roughly $15K/year in taxes that the buyer would be.)

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

#89

Post by DoreenMichele »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #80
Tossrock wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star jugglers do not make a killing, unfortunately. A man with a not unreasonable claim to "best juggler in the world" gave it up and became a concrete contractor. Salaries at Cirque start at $50k.

https://www.macfound.org/fellows/403/

Correct me if I'm wrong: I believe that's a one-time award of $500,000, not "millions."

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

#90

Post by mercutio2 »

beamatronic wrote: post #85

This ($1m total comp) is becoming more and more common. I know of a guy making $650k base and $400k in RSUs first year. Just a Java individual contributor, but with a reputation and buddies high up.

A $400k RSU grant is not $400k towards total compensation in the first year.

RSUs generally vest over 3-4 years, so at the end of the first 12-13 months, it’s another $100k towards total comp.

You may or may not receive additional grants in future years. If you get $400k grants every year, you might get up to $1M/year, but not immediately.

Post reply on HN