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Comment by tjpoutanen | Hacker News Reader

While that may be true for a software engineer the same does not apply to AI talent.

The Vector Institute will offer salaries comparable to top global industrial AI labs. Also the Canadian industry appreciates the value a good data scientist and knows the talent war is global.

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I'd love to hear more on this. Also, since no person is an island, any plans to boost pay for supporting staff and engineers?

Just so we're clear, top ai pays like $250k USD for entry level with no real cap, but senior staff can easily take home $500-900k

I'd also love to hear which employer is paying 250K for an entry level position? This seems like the salary the 1 genius for every 10,000 good graduates would get. And without taking bonus into account, I doubt an engineer is getting paid 900K. You would see that engineer out the door the moment his retirement account was full. No engineer is gonna bust their ass for someone else once they know they are set financially.

When people talk about AI entry level they generally mean people with PhDs.

and yes, people are taking home that kind of money.

More specifically, I hear the top top entry level salaries are going to fresh PhDs from just a small handful of labs.

Which labs?

"Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in computer vision, said one of her Ph.D. candidates had an offer for a job paying more than $1 million a year, and that was only one of four from big and small companies." https://nytimes.com/2016/03/26/technology/the-race-is-on-to-...

That's crazy. Am I wrong in thinking that this is a scary bubble?

Google makes $1m per average employee; it's not hard to believe they can make many times that on an AI researcher.

I don't know if you're wrong, but you're certainly not alone. If you read history, or you're old enough, you'll know that we've already had at least two AI winters (mid 70s to early 80s and early 90s to early 00s), depending on how you count them, and the hype around machine learning is almost word-for-word the same as the hype around expert systems was last time around. This bubble is ripe for bursting.

If I remember correctly, this salary was offered to Andrej Karpathy, who's easily the top 10 in the world in DL field. So, no, it's not a bubble. Top experts have always been paid well.

DL is over hyped. This idea that people from a few AI labs are producing everything is basically SF VCs sniffing the farts of AI departments near SF telling them that only their labs and the labs of a few friends are magically producing pixie dust. It must be nice to be so well connected. When the bubble pops very soon, 1 year on a 500k salary will have been enough for them anyway.

I think that there are 3 or 4 companies who would have happily paid that for say Alex Krizhevsky ("Alex Net") a few years ago, and it's pretty clear that would have paid off (it certainly has for Google).

It is that high, and some engineers are leaving: http://mashable.com/2017/02/14/google-waymo-bonuses/#6sJklr6...

Many more are sticking around because they want to be part of this potentially world changing field, and because you can always find uses for more money.

So to be clear, your thesis is that it's improbable employees can get paid a lot because they would quickly volunteer to stop getting paid a lot?

Source on the salaries?

Likely no published source. OP seems to be involved with U of Toronto's business school "incubator" for A.I. start-ups, which has close ties to Vector Institute.

http://vectorinstitute.ai

Scroll down to career opportunities. The research scientist position is advertised as being competitive with industry labs.

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