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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.
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!
Can't we just get an AI program to write it?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
After I've finished writing "Brain Surgery for Dummies" and "Presidenting for Dummies".
Anyhow, universities should just let the AI bubble pop. That's what happened last time: the 80's AI bubble popped, and universities were just about the only organizations left doing AI research, which fueled the next boom when the hardware caught up. Rinse, repeat.
Table-ized A.I.
What? No. Being a PhD means you sit around, have grad assistants teach your class, grade your papers while you get to sit around in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, smoke a pipe and leer at co-eds. And have your grad assistants write your papers and since you're the PhD, your name is on it. Please, it's the cushiest there is. The fact they are even getting paid is an outrage.
I honestly can't tell if this post is deadpan sarcasm, or if it's serious.
I wonder if the Anonymous Coward who posted it even knows himself which it is.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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.
Every computationally related academic discipline has this problem. When our grad students get a little bit of bioinformatics/data science experience, they get scooped up by industry. Its very hard to recruit post-docs at salaries that can be covered by grant funded budget.
Its OK....they rather spend money on sports and stuff like that. Isn't that what college is about these days?
Money doesn't matter to everybody. I, for example, wouldn't leave a university research job for a private sector job. I have enough money. I can't be the only one.
I don't respond to AC's.
I would argue that if academia is completing for labor with industry in a particular area of study, then has advanced the technology enough to get out of the market. It is time to move on to some other area of research.
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!
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)
And remember, despite what anyone tells you, it is not different this time.
That seems implausible. So many products, ranging from Siri and similar to data mining, rely on AI that there will be a demand for at leat the current level of AI for the foreseeable future. And that completely ignores the strong signals that the current boom is not ending yet.
We tried, but the AI was really intelligent and didn't want to do it either, so it's busy writing another AI program to do all of its work for it.
Or we can just accept a declined standard of living.
Just like after the first industrial revolution ?
I am pretty sure you think you are sarcastically "showing up" the previous poster - but, yes, exactly like the First Industrial Revolution.
The average per capita GDP went up (on average 1.7% a year) but the distribution of income got much more uneven, and the living conditions actually deteriorated for a large share of the population that made up the new working class and pauperism (being destitute) sky rocketed. There is excellent physical documentation of the declining standard of living among working class. Adult heights declined, lives shortened, the portion of recruits unfit for military service shot up. The urban slums and work houses of Dickens time were a product of the FIR.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
This guy is already on it.
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.
If they really needed that person, they really can compete. 5 times less than a 6-figure salary implies you were paying probably around 20-30k which is about average for a PhD student.
That particular college has a $167M endowment, others in the US have billion dollar endowments. But yeah, they can't pay $100k for a good researcher.
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If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries
A university is never going to be able to compete on salary with companies like Apple. Instead universities compete on interest. You can work on groundbreaking, curiosity-driven research that industry usually cannot afford to take a risk on. For example, I'm a particle physicist and get to work at places like CERN trying to understand the fundamental nature of matter while my brother, who is also a physicist, builds better hair dryers. He earns far more than I do and has a huge research budget but it's nowhere near enough to make me even vaguely consider a career change. The reward for my job is not
However, in a few cases like AI the upside potential is so huge that companies like Apple can take a risk on these types of project which, with the higher salaries they can offer, will make them irresistible. I don't really see how this is a problem though. It might make things harder in the short term for university researchers but in the longer term, it will mean more students choose to take CompSci giving them a larger supply of students so that they can cope with losing a few.
Yeah, fuck them. All of the up-side to being an academic disappeared more than a decade ago. If they think salary is the *only* thing theyâ(TM)re not winning at, theyâ(TM)ve got their collective heads up their asses.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
AI is the special case. It grew from machine vision for self driving cars and robotics
Did you just erase several decades of AI research in one fell swoop?
to Big Data data mining
That's more like statistics. That doesn't inform your cognitive models in any way, and one of the huge things in AI is forming improved cognitive models. I don't quite see where there's a contribution in AI from big data in this particular area.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, fuck them. All of the up-side to being an academic disappeared more than a decade ago. If they think salary is the *only* thing theyâ(TM)re not winning at, theyâ(TM)ve got their collective heads up their asses.
Once upon a time, a job at a University (at least here in th e US) wouldn't be the highest pay, but there was usually a decent retirement plan, and the work was pretty stable.
Now Universities have major problems. As tuitions raised by double digit percentage every year, because parents were hypnotized that their children would end up living under a bridge if they didn't have a degree, most degrees don't mean anything at all - no job prospects.
This allowed the Universities to add more and more management and accountants, until professors and researchers were a minority of employees. So those folks sucked up money at an alarming rate.
So there goes any hope of decent compensation, and there goes the decent pension exchanged for 401K type programs. Of course, the multiple levels of management and accountants only knows one thing - you need many more levels of management and even more accountants. Buh-Bye Overhead. My once generous budget for professional development and requirements to pursue it ended up turning into "I read a web page about a process" in the end.
The final nail in this coffin is that Universities have been largely taken over by third wave feminists. You have to sit and listen to be told that as a man, you are a rapist, and that anything a woman decides is sexual harassment is sexual harassment, and you will lose your job.
All in all, a pretty poisonous atmosphere. Where I once would suggest to anyone to pursue a career at University, I now not only say you don't want a career there, but you would be better off getting an online degree.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.