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."

Comments

Pure BS

[guruevi]

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.