Slashdot Mirror
'We Can't Compete': Universities Are Losing Their Best AI Scientists (theguardian.com)
The Guardian shares the story of a PhD student at Imperial College London who abruptly stopped coming to the facility, even as he had one-year of studies left. From the story: Eventually, the professor called him. He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. "He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left," said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. "It's five times the salary I can offer. It's unbelievable. We cannot compete." It is not an isolated case, the report says. Adding: Across the country, talented computer scientists are being lured from academia by private sector offers that are hard to turn down. According to a Guardian survey of Britain's top ranking research universities, tech firms are hiring AI experts at a prodigious rate, fuelling a brain drain that has already hit research and teaching. One university executive warned of a "missing generation" of academics who would normally teach students and be the creative force behind research projects. The impact of the brain drain may reach far beyond academia. Pantic said the majority of top AI researchers moved to a handful of companies, meaning their skills and experience were not shared through society. "That's a problem because only a diffusion of innovation, rather than its concentration into just a few companies, can mitigate the dramatic disruptions and negative effects that AI may bring about."
Pay the salaries or stop complaining that you lose all your talent. We should be devoting at least a few percent of GDP to pure research. University should be a place for pure research but having our brightest minds chasing grants half the time and doing teaching, marking and committee work another 15 hours a week is a total waste basically means professors do their research for free on their own time. It is so frustrating the way we organize pure research at western universities. The USA also has other institutions that do leading edge research such as NASA and a few others. I can't even think of another famous non-american pure research organization other than CERN.
Pay has to be competitive. Canada has to be the worst example of this. Canadian math and computer science departments essential are producing engineers for US companies. A friend just messaged me from California, I realized I was the only Canadian born engineer I knew still working in engineering in Canada and I work remotely for a US company! (sample size 100+ Canadian born colleagues from university or work, 200+ engineers I know well enough in Canada to know their background)
I am a PhD. I have no assistants because the university won’t pay for that. I have three hundred students this semester, and I have to grade all their work myself. I also do all my own research because there are no co-authored papers in my field. I do have a tweed jacket and elbow patches. The coeds are not worth the effort of leering. I get paid $40K/year.
This guy is already on it.