You might be shocked to find out what the job is like for most professors. Grants, grants, and grants.

Our AI lab is mainly experimental at this point, but we're a company so we're looking at how to apply certain models at the wide amount of data in our warehouse and how it could be surfaced in multiple ways.

We've also thrown a lot of money in this endeavor, so there's research and building a foundation with the underlying intent that this will be used to help the company.

I don't think that's too different than the university model of grants and research.

For me, that would maybe balance out if the salary difference was <2x. 5x? Forget about it.

A select few get a chance to truly pick their projects, even then, most need to apply for grants internally and externally to get the funds. Professors may also be tied to teaching, cutting their time from the researches they them valuable. When accounting for this, a lower purchase power and seeing 'the grass is greener' on your private corp peers, you are very likely to think long and hard about jumping ship.

Maybe if you're a big name researcher at a top university. Most people are 'forced' to work on whatever happens to be getting grant money that year. But you are more free with regards to how you approach a problem and what you have to deliver.

Fortunately AI is hot right now so there are lots of projects where you can get funding simply by saying I want to apply machine learning to X.