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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.
Back in my younger days we occasionally solved problems using trial and error to identify the best solution. Today that's called "AI using machine learning" and costs more, because...I don't know why.
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 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?
Since we all here are experts in this field, we can cash in. Right?
Time to update my résumé (resume) on Dice. Maybe I can get a job writing AI for Slashdot that understands Unicode!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.