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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. If you are going to start calling computer algorithms and programs "AI" then everything that runs on computer "AI".
This.
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
In the entire world, fewer than 1000 people have the skills necessary to do unstructured tetrahedral finite element mesh generation. It is possible there are fewer than 1000 people who have the skills necessary to understand what exactly we mesh makers do. And, Surprise! there is demand for fewer than 1000 people to write unstructured tetrahedral finite element mesh generation. And far fewer than 1000 people are needed to manage them.
I am glad the periodical bubbles that infect Wall Street and venture capitalists benefits PhDs once in a while. Most of the time it benefits hedge fund monkeys or stock market cheats or lottery winners with delusions of grandeur or plain sociopaths. Happy for my grad school classmates. Enjoy the windfall while lasts, Ramachandran\s, Yang\s, Hsu\s, Gupta\s, Parpia\s and Wickramasinghe\s.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You should at least try to understand what you are talking about. Deep learning, aka neural networks, are not "algorithms and programs". They are part of the machine learning branch of AI. The computer is not programmed but learns by itself. People in computer science have been trying to do that for as long as computers have been around but were never quite successful until about 2012. Deep learning excels at tasks which are too complicated for humans to write code such as detecting objects in picture and analyzing recordings of voices or translating text. This is revolutionary. Even the primitive neural net technology we currently have will transform many applications in the next few years, in that they perform much better than what humans used to code and they require just a handful of AI specialists to train instead of team of 100 programmers. If the technology continues to improve, it could take over just about every field: driving, medicine, law, manufacturing, etc. But the current technology has limitations and it's not clear how much it can progress further.
Computer programmer could be one of the first job to be made obsolete by deep learning. Programmers will have retrain themselves as teachers to neural nets instead.
From my investigation of the matter it looks to be some sort of multi-variate analysis in drag. Uninteresting. Basically you get guys sitting around twiddling knobs. Finding the right parameters which works for a little bit and then you start knob twiddling again to find the next ones.
Except for 1 key difference. With Deep-Neural-Nets, the knobs twiddle themselves alone.
DNN get inspiration of how some neural network work in the nature (e.g.: a column in the primary visual cortex of the brain) to design thing that you can throw at problems, and which will autonomously train themselves.
Some years back I wrote a day trading program for a friend. It dynamically changed its behavior depending on the market signals and the rules he gave it (stops, buys, shift to a different stock etc.) which he found useful. Now that was fun.
These older program require you to have precise criteria in advance.
That works perfectly well with clearly codified problem - the friend has a clear set of rules that need implementation.
That completely fails for more vague problem ("detect a face") - it would be possible in theory to design a set of rules that can detect a face - a Haar Cascade. But designing such set of rules is extremely complex and cumbersome. And each time you need something new ("detect if there's a bird"), you would need to repeat all the hard work to invent yet another set of rules.
At that point, better take an advice from how mother nature solved the problem (by using stacks of neural network in a columns) and simply throw a DNN (e.g: a Convolution Neural Net - a ConvNet) at the problem, and watch it self organize and come up with a solution to your problem.
It's the modern-day equivalent of training pigeons to peck a city images to steer a missile.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I know a guy who cut and pastes Javascript snippets to make interactive query windows for websites. His main job is as a creative director at a mid-tier advertising agency. He calls his work 'AI research'. I am not kidding - he makes over $100k per year.
The biggest problem I have found with smart people, is they don't think stupid people should be paid lots of money for work they think is simple. The more successful ones have figured out that it is much better to cash in on such situations rather than lament what the world has come too.