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

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

#171

Post by beamatronic » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

mercutio2 wrote: post #90

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.

This was monthly RSU grants vesting from day 1.

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

#172

Post by eli_gottlieb » Tue, Oct 01, 2019, 7:37 PM UTC

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #124

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm a grad student, so my current means are pretty modest, but, well, yeah. Not saving and paying down debts is insane in an economy that is either in a recession or about to be.

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

#173

Post by mjn » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #96

mjn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, IJCA…

A Ph.D.'s worth of first authored NeurIPS/ICML papers will get you a very good job pretty easily still. But AI slices papers very thin and author lists are inflated relative to other subfields of CS. A single paper in one of the major conferences is a pretty marginal contribution, especially if you're in the middle of a long author list. Also, NeurIPS reviewing has gone to absolute hell. I mean, peer review everywher…

I've gone in a similar direction. Only at smaller conferences can you have any kind of confidence that your reviewers are people with actual expertise in the field. That's pretty useful, not only because it makes it less likely you'll get reviews that are very annoying, but also because a review by a knowledgeable person can be genuinely valuable. The big conferences are full of reviews written by 2nd-year grad students, because with this many submissions, any warm body with anything approaching credentials is needed.

Besides just "quality" in the general sense, one thing this has really hurt, I think, is any sense of history or continuity. There are a ton of reviewers who have basically no familiarity with the pre-2010 ML literature, and it kind of shows in both the reviews and the papers that get published. I mean I get that deep learning beats a lot of older methods on major benchmarks, but it's still not the case that literally every problem, controversy, and technique was first studied post-2010.

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

#174

Post by joshvm » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 6:06 AM UTC

neuralsp wrote: post #162

joshvm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, now you're addressing my line of questions. >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. That's just what I mean. It would depend on someone asking you about it, right? (As opposed to being an iOS or Android developer or running microservices…

As much as I'd like to say you'd get caught quickly, you could probably get away with it for a while in any group that didn't have ML expertise already.

If you really wanted to you could fabricate results and in lots of cases nobody would be any the wiser unless you were supposed to be releasing software. Despite emphasis on peer review and repeatability, science relies heavily on etiquette. If you don't release code or a dataset a lot of times it's extremely difficult to repeat paper results, and that also means it's hard to disprove the work.

It's quite hard to get rid of incompetent people in academia, so I imagine you could get away with at least a year or two.

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

#175

Post by scottlegrand2 » Wed, Oct 02, 2019, 3:07 PM UTC

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #155

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the turning point for him was his excellent presentation in the first youtube broadcast of cs231. If I remember correctly he was getting seven-figure offers before he even graduated from Stanford. I do not know him personally and I doubt I will ever meet him but we did compete for the same position at Tesla and I lost to a very worthy opponent. my only regret is that the final interview would have been with Elon Musk himself and I would have loved to meet him.

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

#176

Post by alphagrep12345 » Thu, Oct 03, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

scottlegrand2 wrote: post #175

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think the turning point for him was his excellent presentation in the first youtube broadcast of cs231. If I remember correctly he was getting seven-figure offers before he even graduated from Stanford. I do not know him personally and I doubt I will ever meet him but we did compete for the same position at Tesla and I lost to a very worthy opponent. my only regret is that the final interview would have been with E…

Oh wow, very interesting. Are you a PhD who works in this area too?