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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.
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.
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.
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)
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