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'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."
Why should they be surprised? PHDs are treated like crappy free labor by universities.
Perhaps when they stopping paying administration officials obscene salaries and pay professors and grads what they are actually worth the quality at universities will improve.
Universities are turning from being institutions of eductation to political shitshows. Nobody needs that noise if you've got skills and want to actually learn or achieve something.
Company pays more for person to work on a product than a university pays to work on research. News at 11.
If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries instead of beanbags, crayons, safe spaces and "grounds improvement" and whatever the hell else they spend gobs of that money on.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm speaking as a professor at a university, and I don't see why this is a bad thing.
Research at universities is a good thing, don't get me wrong, But R&D at companies is also valuable. In many cases even more valuable, because companies want research that actually leads to a practical result. Too many university researchers are farting around with abstract stuff of no foreseeable use to anyone, publishing useless results in write-only journals.
Research at a company is measured on a different scale: can it be used for something? Who thinks we would have multi-core, multi-GHz processors in our pockets, if this hadn't been driven by commercial interests? A few ideas were developed at universities, but practically the entire computer revolution has been driven by commercial research. Maybe it's now time for AI to follow that route as well - we've fiddled with it in academia since the 1950s, but finally - finally - it may lead to something more than niche applications in the real world.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Its OK....they rather spend money on sports and stuff like that. Isn't that what college is about these days?
And we're complaining that people with Ph.D.s, who normally go homeless in the real world, are managing to get high paying jobs?? We should be thanking the good fucking lord!
Every company these days thinks they need AI.
This reminds me of how companies have been flocking to data warehousing during the past few years. They all want it. They don't know why they want it, but they've heard it's powerful, and that means they have to have it. Meanwhile, many of those same companies haven't really mastered the fundamentals of their relational databases.
The result of this hype is that anybody who can convince a clueless hiring manager that they know something about AI...can get hired for exorbitant amounts of money.
Yes, AI is good for many things. Companies like Apple and Google and IBM are putting it to good use. But many companies are just jumping on the bandwagon. Like all bubbles, this one will burst at some point.