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

151–160 of 176 posts

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

#151

Post by neuralsp »

joshvm wrote: post #149
neuralsp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

> Do you think it is possible to that without any background in anything? To do machine learning research? Or work in some random domain? > I mean could someone apply black box frameworks without understanding them. How would they be caught? Machine learning is rapidly becoming commoditised, but lots of people still don't understand just how much effort it is to get a good dataset and to prep Domain experts scoff at…

My question is whether someone could fake it and not be caught/fired. (So yes, I meant: "Or work in some random domain?")

From the second half of your comment it seems that the answer is yes?

Maybe a comparison would help: someone pretending to be an experienced iOS/Android developer without any qualifications or ability would quickly be caught. Since they couldn't produce any working app or use a compiler, and anyone can judge an app for themselves. You can't really just make it up out of whole cloth, people judge the results. You would have to start actually doing that, and if you couldn't or didn't want to, then unless you outsourced your own job or something the jig would be up pretty much instantly. (Unless you caught up.)

So, how about machine learning? Do you think a fraud could land and keep such a job, without any knowledge, qualifications, ability, or even interest in getting up to speed? Just, a pure, simple fraud.

What's your guess?

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

#152

Post by laxatives »

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…

Fat chance, there’s hundreds of papers and tens of thousands of attendees at NeurIPS every year. Less than 5% of these people will make 7 figures yearly.

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

#153

Post by nostrademons »

aledalgrande wrote: post #117
nostrademons wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-Mou…

Wow the Bay area is crazier and crazier, 2M for that dump... yeah 4 bedroom in Mountain View, but it's a 1964 and looks like it's going to fall down at the first gust of wind. Everything inside the house is to be remade too and in 2012 the property was worth 700K. That area is literally unliveable now.

It's a different lifestyle. You're just not in your house a whole lot in the Bay Area. My weekend involved a trip to a science museum & zoo; picnic lunch by the Bay; friend's kid's 2nd birthday party at a park; gymnastics class for my toddler; mom's group at the park; meeting up with mother-in-law; and a carnival. During the weekdays you're usually behind a computer screen most of the time, or you go for a hike, bike home, or take part in an organized activity (I took Krav Maga lessons after work from the former head of the IDF's counterterrorism training for a couple years). It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to spend a lot of money for a house or a lot of time to fix it up nicely when it's basically just a place to sleep. (Sometimes I wonder if folks who buy these $2M homes are just folks who have bought into the conventional idea of the American dream and absolutely must own a home.)

And then on the flip side, most of those folks own financial assets elsewhere - either they get stock options in their employer, or they sell those stock options and diversify among other stocks, or they buy 5 homes in the Midwest and rent them out as an absentee landlord.

The system is driven by the massive amount of money flowing into the region from all over the globe as software eats the world - this fills local municipalities with tax dollars that they can use to provide public goods, and it inflates the stock compensation that companies pay their employees, which gives them money to afford the exorbitant rents while still saving up a million or so. It's ultimately unsustainable - bad things are going to happen to Silicon Valley once software is not the engine of growth throughout the world - but that's probably a few decades off, and in the meantime people who partake in the system can afford to buy up whole city blocks in Detroit.

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

#154

Post by nostrademons »

ModernMech wrote: post #148
sdan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible. Family of 5 renting (around 3k) in the bay with 100k salary is certainly possible. Lived like this for over a decade. Now moving onto college.

I have no idea how that is possible. I made $100k in the bay area and it was just my wife and I. Here's how it worked out: $100k salary = $74k after tax, so that's about $6k per month take home. $3000 per month for rent leaves $3000 for everything else. My wife and I have $1000 per month on our student loans. So we're down to $2000 per month. Health insurance and medication was $600 a month for the two of us, down to…

I think your issue is SF. In most of the Bay Area (including desirable parts of the South Bay like Mountain View & Sunnyvale) you can get 1BRs for $2000/month or 2BRs for about $2600. Less in the East Bay. My family of 3 spends about $300/month on groceries - knowing the local immigrant grocers can shave off a lot on fresh produce, our vegetable bill is usually about $13/week for about 20 lbs. of fresh vegetables. We get meats at Costco for pretty cheap.

I would also highly recommend paying off the student loans before having kids. My parents borrowed close to $100K to send my sister and I to college, and 4 years after graduation it was paid off completely, after saving 80% of my income and contributing it back to them. Because of compound interest, a few extra contributions towards the principal shorten the term of the loan dramatically, because it means that the loan balance shrinks, the amount of interest owed each month shrinks, and so a greater percentage of each payment is applied to the principal, which speeds up repayment even more.

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

#155

Post by alphagrep12345 »

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #122
nharada wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experienc…

Interesting that you mention about Andrej Karpathy. I've long wondered about his meteoric rise. No doubt he's intelligent, but there's definitely more to the story. What do you think it is? Is it majorly because of the right timing and being under the right profs? His blog? His class? I'm currently a grad student. So if I want to replicate even an iota of it, how do I do it?

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

#156

Post by sdan »

ModernMech wrote: post #148
sdan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s possible. Family of 5 renting (around 3k) in the bay with 100k salary is certainly possible. Lived like this for over a decade. Now moving onto college.

I have no idea how that is possible. I made $100k in the bay area and it was just my wife and I. Here's how it worked out: $100k salary = $74k after tax, so that's about $6k per month take home. $3000 per month for rent leaves $3000 for everything else. My wife and I have $1000 per month on our student loans. So we're down to $2000 per month. Health insurance and medication was $600 a month for the two of us, down to…

Haven't gone too much into financials (given that it was my dad who was making the salary).

But I know it was right around 100k and rent is exactly 3k(live in Cupertino) a month. Not sure what other strings had to be pulled, but I'm glad I lived a decent life in SV.

Kind of ridiculous part is we don't even qualify for financial aid for some colleges/application fees.

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

#157

Post by pimmen »

puranjay wrote: post #73
opportune wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to do a PhD, and make sure you get a good adviser/good department, and get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen to your adviser and department, and be very careful with how you spend your time (if you spend a lot of time on something that doesn't end up being fruitful, that's opportunity cost that other top researchers might have turned into a breakout publication and now you are behind). And you make…

The strangest thing is that knowing a lot of PhDs and PhD students (my wife is currently one), very few are motivated by financial rewards. Making money isn't always seen as a yardstick of success by their peers.

That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".

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

#158

Post by dang »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #92
aledalgrande wrote: post #25

I think this article just reeks of jealousy. What is wrong with paying people doing top research a top salary? Their skills are extremely rare. And I bet executives get way more anyway.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#159

Post by setr »

foota wrote: post #132
harry8 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Penn Jilette is the biggest star in juggling that I know of. He seems to make pretty good money in so far as one can infer these things.

I would say that he's more like an entertainer that can juggle.

That's probably a better description for "star" x than being the best at x.

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

#160

Post by joshvm »

neuralsp wrote: post #151
joshvm wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think it is possible to that without any background in anything? To do machine learning research? Or work in some random domain? > I mean could someone apply black box frameworks without understanding them. How would they be caught? Machine learning is rapidly becoming commoditised, but lots of people still don't understand just how much effort it is to get a good dataset and to prep Domain experts scoff at…

My question is whether someone could fake it and not be caught/fired. (So yes, I meant: "Or work in some random domain?") From the second half of your comment it seems that the answer is yes? Maybe a comparison would help: someone pretending to be an experienced iOS/Android developer without any qualifications or ability would quickly be caught. Since they couldn't produce any working app or use a compiler, and anyon…

OK I misinterpreted slightly.

Fake it til you make it isn't a terrible strategy. But pure fraud? If you didn't even make an attempt to learn on the job? You'd get caught pretty fast as soon as someone started asking any kind of in depth questions about the models you were supposed to be training.

I'm not sure you could land a job knowing nothing. Maybe. Depends how hard you get interviewed and whether they know about machine learning. If you could fake a portfolio and nobody questioned it perhaps? I can see that happening in academia for sure.

There are a few problem classes where you could throw stuff into a black box and get great results out. Image classification for example. Fast.ai have made that three lines of code.

So maybe there are a bunch of applications where you could fake it, especially if you were willing to Google your way round the answers.

Would be harder in industry I think, but you find incompetent people everywhere.

Post reply on HN