> You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia.
Nobody is stealing anything. What they don’t realize is that the free market will incentivize AI researchers to go to the private sector. It’s just simple economics.
Nobody is stealing anything. What they don’t realize is that the free market will incentivize AI researchers to go to the private sector. It’s just simple economics.
For instance, the public US university I attended for grad school has an endowment of about $1B, and spent ~$150M on athletics in the past year. A post doc salary there is about $40k a year.
Why would anyone take this over $200k a year (with lots of sweet perks) at eg Google? Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
Talking about level playing fields here seems disingenuous.
Athletics programs are a huge driver of both alumni donations and student enrollment. Unfortunately. Not to mention licensing revenue from apparel and the like.
> Because they are passionate about academic research (and potentially teaching), something that the university is very aware of and has no problem using to their advantage.
This was more effective when the pay disparity was smaller.
Obviously facetious, but "stealing" is not some axiomatic boolean that never changes. It's judged differently by different societies depending on time, circumstances, and ideas.
"Raiding" employees was common place. Now there are non-raid agreements. If non-raid agreements became very ubiquitous it would be considered stealing.
Working employees 100 hour weeks with no overtime was commonplace. Now there are labor laws. It would be considered wage theft and exactly "stealing" if you did it today.
"Simple economics" gives you no guidelines to judge any of these things "stealing" or "not stealing".
Making a job offer to an academic that they accept isn’t a statutory offense punishable by law, and therefore is not stealing, no matter how much you play with semantics.
Don’t worry about the phenomenon itself, which is 2 entities acting legally and of their own volition. Worry about the systems at play that enable the phenomenon. Universities are clearly not compensating (whether in terms of raw dollars or benefits) AI researchers sufficiently. That’s what one should be concerned about, not “theft” of AI researchers.
Really?
I wish we would give people a chance before we dismiss people as dumb/.. .
In a link from this quote: "You have expressed concern that corporations have ‘stolen’ talent from academia. Is this still an issue?" https://www.nature.com/news/ai-talent-grab-sparks-excitement... I can't find a word "stolen" or anything similar being used at all.
Seems like it was introduced by a journalist who wrote final article. And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
> "It’s continuing. ..."
So he's not objecting to the phrasing, eh?
The linked article has this:
> The loss of expertise in academia concerns Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal in Canada, which has also seen a surge in graduate-student applications. If industry-hired faculty members do retain university roles — as Hinton has at the University of Toronto and Ng has at Stanford University in California — they are usually only minor, says Bengio.
So it's obvious he's not concerned about corporations literally "stealing" students and faculty somehow, like unmarked vans and burly men in black turtlenecks, eh?
> And considering that, it's not hard to believe that this journalist may have some opinions on economics that are far from reality, that (probably unconsciously) triggered his word-twisting reflex.
The word "stealing" is in quotes in TFA.