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Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries For Scarce AI Talent (santafenewmexican.com)
jmcbain writes: Machine learning and artificial intelligence skills are in hot demand right now, and it's driving up the already-high salaries in Silicon Valley. "Tech's biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence (Warning: may be paywalled; alternative source)," reports the New York Times, and "typical AI specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock." The New York Times notes there are several catalysts for rocketing salaries that all come down to supply and demand. There is competition among the giant companies (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Uber) as well as the automative companies wanting help with self-driving cars. However, the biggest issue is the supply: "Most of all, there is a shortage of talent, and the big companies are trying to land as much of it as they can. Solving tough A.I. problems is not like building the flavor-of-the-month smartphone app. In the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research, according to Element AI, an independent lab in Montreal."
I am sure "Element AI" wants to pretend there is such a thing as AI, but there isn't. Playing "Go" is not "AI" and neither is autonomous driving...
AI tends to drive a belief that modeling intelligence perfectly is a necessary requirement when it is in fact artificial. Reality dictates the bar is much lower for adoption. Good enough AI specialists will create good enough AI. Autonomous cars don't have to be perfect. They merely have to do better than humans. 40,000 vehicular deaths per year just in the US tends to set the good enough bar pretty damn low. AI will do the same.
Don't want to call it AI? OK, fine. Massive Disruption has a catchy marketing ring to it...
This is a perfect example of companies (HR) searching for stuff that doesn't exist.
No doubt all of their job postings require 5 more years experience in AI than it's actually been around.
While there is undoubtedly a shortage of talent, odds are that the industry is screening out many who do have AI experience, but fail to meet the rigid and ignorant requirements HR is looking for.
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Modern AI software isn't that complicated and not nearly as expensive to get people in. Look at job offers: $150k for AI research scientists in NYC. $65k in more rural areas. That's not well paid by definition at all. Sure, a pure AI scientist gets paid $500k just like a top neuroscience scientist gets paid $500k or a top biology researcher, but the majority of companies do not want to do the theoretical development of AI, any regular programmer can wrap their heads around the existing literature and build something.
Here in my area, there are a number of employers looking for AI engineers/scientists. They pay about what I make as a non-AI IT sysadmin, which is given my experience on the higher scale but by no means exceptional.
What Google and co wants is a glut of people 4-6 years from now that are "trained" in AI from college. You put out a report like this, you get massive amounts of people applying for the schools that offer programs and 5 years from now you have an over-abundance of people driving down overall wages. You also get to hire a bunch of people on H1B because the "US doesn't have the skillz" and you end up with a bunch of programmers on H1B under the guise of AI development.
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Programmers will have retrain themselves as teachers to neural nets instead.
The sky is not falling here. Writing code is the easy part. The hard part is conducting meetings among business analysts and executives and documenting specifications and iteratively building those specifications against their expectations. The magical part is knowing the difference between what is asked for and what the customer really needs - all the while layering against the business domain. An AI won't be able to do this no sooner than it could replace an intelligent person with good social skills and business acumen. The only "programmers" that will be replaced would be the kind we have already replaced with higher level programing... until the day comes when we welcome our robot overlords.
Autonomous cars don't have to be perfect. They merely have to do better than humans. 40,000 vehicular deaths per year just in the US tends to set the good enough bar pretty damn low. AI will do the same.
Actually, if you want people to accept autonomous cars, you will have to do *MUCH* better than humans. Think of the civil lawsuits and subsequent damages if a computer-driven car kills someone...
Nice rhetoric—factual statement masquerading as metaphor, for any reader dumb enough to go along for the ride.
The Evolution of the Flour Mill from Prehistoric Ages to Modern Times — 1905
That's about the present state of machine learning, the hand-crafting of "features" playing the role of the recently discarded flat blocks.
Wheat is an incredible dietary resource, with the starch being light enough to transport over long distances, if only one can find a way to remove it (contrast potatoes, only ever transported downhill, if at all, until the invention of steam power). Once upon a time, all food was local, as, too, was starvation (fear the blight).
A better method to mill the world's vast stores of accumulated data is a big deal, even if we remain in the relatively crude era of water-powered stone grinding wheels.
Data is a bit like wheat, it doesn't give up its curvature easily. Too much applied force creates heat and destroys the end product. The applied force must have exactly the right ratio of compressive to shear stress, which only an expert miller can judge. Deep learning is nothing more than a slightly better mill than the one we had before, and it ranks right up there beside becoming slightly better at milling wheat.
The economic value of the curvature we can now hope to unlock is quite large. And probably there's a lot of curvature yet to find that remains inaccessible to current methodology.
Data is oil. Data is also wheat.
By way of contrast, unstructured tetrahedral finite element mesh generation shaves 5% of the metal mass off a milling apparatus that already worked just fine, being just one of ten thousand noisy specializations in the great roil of small improvements where a penny shaved is a penny earned.
Nevertheless, apparently a great career option for the metaphorically challenged.