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AI Researchers Are Making More Than $1 Million, Even at a Nonprofit (nytimes.com)
One of the poorest-kept secrets in Silicon Valley has been the huge salaries and bonuses that experts in artificial intelligence can command. Now, a little-noticed tax filing by a research lab called OpenAI has made some of those eye-popping figures public [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: OpenAI paid its top researcher, Ilya Sutskever, more than $1.9 million in 2016. It paid another leading researcher, Ian Goodfellow, more than $800,000 -- even though he was not hired until March of that year. Both were recruited from Google. A third big name in the field, the roboticist Pieter Abbeel, made $425,000, though he did not join until June 2016, after taking a leave from his job as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Those figures all include signing bonuses.
[...] Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology and thousands of companies want to work with it. Element AI, an independent lab in Canada, estimates that 22,000 people worldwide have the skills needed to do serious A.I. research -- about double from a year ago.
[...] Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology and thousands of companies want to work with it. Element AI, an independent lab in Canada, estimates that 22,000 people worldwide have the skills needed to do serious A.I. research -- about double from a year ago.
Since we all here are experts in this field, we can cash in. Right?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Besides talking a bunch of bullshit and not producing anything?
Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology
...because there are not many hiring managers who understand the technology, so they throw money at it instead.
There will be 4 times as many AI "experts" next year and more than half of them will not be able to find their ass with both hands and AI. But the MBAs will hire them for key roles because AI is the new blockchain & everyone just must be doing it - whatever it is.
For what is essentially creating PR for an incremental improvement in software that has existed since the dawn of computing. Their hyperbole skills are certainly impressive, and it's true: most people probably aren't comfortable being that blatantly disengenuous. I guess 22,000 is the baseline in the population for flim-flamitis.
Expect India to have a flood of AI researchers soon.
Non-profit organizations just don't have shareholders/owners who get paid. Employees can and do get whopping salaries. For example there's a good chance your local hospital is organized as a non-profit but the president/CEO takes home around 7 figures.
I earn $50,000 a year in IT in Silicon Valley. Sometimes I get a Christmas bonus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out
after $70.000 the amount of happiness stops increasing, the rest is just selfishness and greed
how many people (children) are starving so a few people can live a life of affluence and waste
the world would be a paradise for all if it wasn't for all the corrupt evil people at the top of the economic pile
China is paying experienced AI expert even more
Baidu, for example, is paying its top AI researchers 7 figures (in US dollars), every month
Peter Norvig is probably worth mentioning, since he is one of the biggest names in AI, one of the biggest names in programming, and almost certainly is making millions at Google. He's the kind of guy who could create Bitcoin in his spare time if he wanted to.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I earn $50,000 a year in IT in Silicon Valley. Sometimes I get a Christmas bonus.
I knew a salesman who had a base of $50,000 salary when we techies were making $70K+. His Christmas bonus sometimes was 7 figures.
He got the job because he was a handsome 6' 2" ex-ballplayer. He eventually retired from the C suite and we techies had our jobs sent to India.
This million dollar a year will fade along with this initial rush to get into AI. I've seen it before with other tech fads.
AI has incredible promise. From being able to run a simulation to find out what the competition is likely to do, to being able to see when, how, and where the enemy will attack, it brings with it the promise to win wars, find criminals before they do their mis-deeds, weed out revolutionaries, and grant the owners of the AI immense money and power.
AI is a genie, and there are many organizations and countries trying to rub it and pop the cork, as it has the promise to solve everything and anything.
It is no wonder why it is such a hot commodity right now, especially in China where it can solve their dissident problem and win wars for their hegemony without a shot being fired.
What, no "AI coding bootcamps" to drive salaries down?
Non-profits frequently pay good salaries, for the very reason that any profits they make, they need to actually spend back on their organization.
Of course, OpenAI is Musk and Altman's little hobby and probably considered "educational" rather than "charitable". Nevertheless, they need to pay competitive salaries if they want to hire good people, and these are two of the best names in AI right now.
"The Higher Your Salary, the More Time Your Employer Will Pay You Not To Work"
“When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star,” Mr. Nicholson of the start-up Skymind said. “You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.”
The irony here is that geeks have become the very thing they complained about years ago. We are a modern day jock. A geeky athlete commanding sports-level pay and compensation. Geeky "stadiums" built for us called R&D/Think-tanks, and Clouds galore.
I don't understand what I'm supposed to be outraged about. There are people who presumably have valuable skills. They are recruited with money. Am I supposed to dislike them for getting paid well? Is this part of the "let's hate the successful people" campaign that's so popular recently?
At those kinds of wages for employees, pretty much ANY company is going to be non-profit!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How does that compare to the top 3 people in other fields? What are the top 3 CEOs making? Top 3 car salesman? Top 3 educators? Top 3 lobbyists? Top 3 total gross income of government officials? Top 3 garbage men? Top 3 garbage women? Is there some discrimination in that area we need to deal with by lowering those garbage men's wages?
I've met 3 programmers I know are worth a million a year. Some positions have a multiplier effect being 10% better than the next guy might be worth 10 million to a company. They are producing code that will run on hundreds of computers and potentially control billions in assets. It seems surprising that some good programmers are not making that same money as sports or movie stars. (OK - some in finance are making that money but I don't count that)
True, but people are terrible at making the determination of "contribution". They can't even get their own contribution to society right.
Being a nonprofit is a tax structure, and it by no means indicates "poor". Effectively all it means is "we spend every last penny", frequently on salaries and bonuses.
Skills are skills, and you can make top dollar at a nonprofit if your skills are in high demand.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Work faster! I want to retire while self-duplicating robots serve me.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
See subject you UNIDENTIFIABLE punk & how I show how DUMB you are on hosts vs. addons https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12003589&cid=56472075/ lol! That is how/why hosts files are faster & also start LONG BEFORE redundant, crippled by default, LIMITED IN ABILITY vs. hosts & overhead ridden inefficient addons!
* Still "butthurt" over that MASSIVE FUCKUP of yours? Yes.
(No 'small wonder' you HIDE behind UNIDENTIFIABLE anonymous posts - I've quite obviously BLOWN YOU AWAY so many times in addition to the links I post here now from this week alone, you HAVE to hide vs. using your "registered 'luser'" FAKE NAME for your FAKE LIFE account!)
* Lastly, though I am SURE it disappoints you projecting as you are? I am not gay.
APK
P.S.=> Your other lie about me was also disproved here https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12003589&cid=56465701/ Don't "F" w/ your betters (me)... apk
The top coders in other areas get fat checks too. That does absolutely NOT mean that across the board everyone in AI will get a fat check. For me: I could pick up e.g. tensorflow in a couple hard weekends of effort. But for what? To bust my ass doing some boring math shit to convince some geeks just to get paid exactly the fucking same. Thanks but no.
yeah, nonprofit, all it means is that all money is just spend on extra high salaries as the company is not allowed to make profit. We give a lot of money to non-profit organisations, but a lot of it is spend on increased salaries, and not on actual what it's meant for.
AI is the latest buzzword. Every little company out there is touting the latest AI advances, and will sell at whatever price they can get. Most of the technology called "AI" isn't even smart, it's just "proof of concept" code that doesn't come close to what anyone would call AI. Most shops don't even understand relational databases yet, let alone "business intelligence" or now..."AI." I call BS. And of course, those who like to use BS to sell their services, aren't shy about charging exorbitant rates for that BS.