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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

#121

Post by megaremote »

codingslave wrote: post #43
mruts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that’s pretty insulting, honestly. Black or Sholes were making >10m as thought leaders in banks. It’s surprising to me that finance is so passe as a career despite the fact, as Matt Levine said, “they are run as employee run co-ops.” In otherwords, big big money. Entry level analysts at my old firm were making over 250k total comp.

People in tech generally have no clue of how much money gets made in finance

> People in tech generally have no clue of how much money gets made in finance

People in everything have no clue. Nothing to do with tech people being ignorant.

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

#122

Post by scottlegrand2 »

nharada wrote: post #114
scottlegrand2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the people who come to your company could probably do better elsewhere if money is all they care about. You work at Cruise am I right? I know someone personally who worked at Cruise who was making 7 figures. That sort of compensation is just not that unusual anymore. But I've learned that money isn't everything the hard way. However, if you're whining about being underpaid, there's something you can do about it.…

I don’t doubt that either people could do better elsewhere or that someone makes a million dollars, but it’s disingenuous to claim that “If you publish a major conference paper, 7 figures is pretty easy to attain” when this is not true by most measures. It might happen to some people but “pretty easy” implies most fresh PhDs could do this.

I think you are embodying the notion "You miss all the shots you don't take." You're right that most fresh PhDs cannot do this (I did say top 5%). But I think we disagree as to why. You seem to think these positions do not exist and I know otherwise because I've been on both sides of the very same hiring process for which they do exist. The reason most new PhDs won't get them is because they lack the career experience to navigate the interview process to such a position. I'd love to see a world where someone teaches them those skills while they're still in academia. I sure could have used that.

I also know because the day I left academia myself long ago was a major payday for me. Finally, I know because people like Andrei Karpathy pulled it off because of his excellent communication skills, intelligence and the right background. And people like Mu Li pulled it off by associating themselves with an academic who who helped found AWS AI and in his case he landed a principal engineering position straight out of school. That's the sort of position one usually only gets after one to two decades of job experience.

Can we just agree to disagree here?

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

#123

Post by zawerf »

ec109685 wrote: post #113
ychen306 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> , though he did not join until June 2016

So his effective salary is double that.

I think people are supposed to report their salary with the stock price at grant, not after appreciation (at least on levels.fyi). But yea it's a lot more because google stock is half their comp and it keeps doubling every 3-4 years.

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

#124

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #20
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?

As someone presently doing a PhD in machine learning and neuroscience, which includes submitting to AI conferences... Frankly, I think this is a bubble, and don't expect to ever make anything like that much money, in academia or industry. Yes, deep learning has a lot of successes and industrial applications, but deep learning wizards are not nearly so impossible to replace or replicate. As the field settles more towa…

I hope that you live below your current means.

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

#125

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

ryacko wrote: post #53
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.

Directly.

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

#126

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#127

Post by Zaheer »

zawerf wrote: post #123
ec109685 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So his effective salary is double that.

I think people are supposed to report their salary with the stock price at grant, not after appreciation (at least on levels.fyi). But yea it's a lot more because google stock is half their comp and it keeps doubling every 3-4 years.

I’m from Levels.fyi. We actually request users to report compensation with appreciation. This is because the appreciation can actually be used to negotiate compensation elsewhere and provides a more accurate picture.

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

#128

Post by usaar333 »

aledalgrande wrote: post #115
nostrademons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (wh…

Very interesting how affluent people still rent. I noticed the same in LA in a high end building. What is the reason? Having more money to invest in different asset classes instead of the biggest chunk being in real estate?

Freedom to move, don't want to deal with burdens of ownership, better ROI to rent, etc.

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

#129

Post by robomartin »

not2b wrote: post #31
robomartin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context is always important. At the end of the day it is about what value you bring to the table. If the work fits your experience and capabilities well, charging anything between $150 and $250+ per hour on a long term contract isn't out of the question, I've done it many time, with multi-year engagements. The best deal I did was some 25 years ago was substantially above that range. Of course, part of it is being a g…

Contract numbers shouldn't be directly compared to employee compensation numbers. A contractor has additional expenses and taxes and can have periods between contracts with nothing coming in, so needs to be making more money to have equivalent net income after taxes and expenses.

No difference in my experience. It's all part of the negotiation. I used "contract" as a general term rather than to mean just contract work.

Of course, I am talking about outliers here, that should be understood. In most of these cases it is, as I said, a right-place, right-time, right-skills circumstance, an alignment of the planets, if you will.

I've seen even crazier stuff. Back during the most heated phase of the internet bubble savvy guys were making outrageous deals. I remember one guy who wanted to charge $500 per hour if he worked from home and $800 if he had to come to the office...to complete a Visual Basic project. No, he was not hired. Wrong place/time/skills.

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

#130

Post by usaar333 »

jseliger wrote: post #93
currymj wrote: post #21

Misleading article and headline; a few celebrity researchers in high-up positions make this much. You can probably find some chemists who make $1M too if they have made it to executive positions. Most AI researchers in industry make a lot of money, $200k+, but that is not so outrageous in the context of big tech companies. And in fact the vast majority of AI researchers are making $20k-$30k a year, because they are g…

Nonprofits are more like businesses than people realize: https://seliger.com/2012/09/02/why-nonprofits-are-more-like-... and they pay market rates. Maybe some people will accept someone less for the sake of working at a nonprofit but very few people will accept substantial paycuts over the long term

I've generally found nonprofits pay well below market in exchange for doing social good. Universities are the most obvious example, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative being another
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