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.

Comments

You all know what happens next!

[ne7minder]

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.

Re:What skills are required?

[PPH]

50 years ago, there was already a pretty good foundation of solution space search techniques. No need to 'trial and error' stuff. Put these together with things like Bayes classifiers and you've got a pretty good start at AI. Just not in real time, with the slow processors of the day.