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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.
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.
Right now it's all deep-learning neural networks, so linear algebra combined with calculus and statistics (of course, statistics with calculus), and C++ kinds of parallel processing. If you can do all that then the theoretical parts are things you can get caught up on in six months.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You can't use someone else's engine if you want to invent new AI. Some tools like twnsorfoow can help, but if you want to make a million in annual salary you have to be able to do more than train a NN.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."