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'We can't compete': why universities are losing their best AI scientists

112 points by sasvari 9y ago

adamnemecek 9y ago
The idea of a university needs to be restructured. Maybe this will motivate them to do so. E.g. unbundling would be a great idea. Also make teaching a class less of a lifestyle choice and more of a "we made sure this person knows his/her shit". Taking classes from people who have a lot of industry experience would be dope. Also setup research institutes like Inria of fraunhofer. a lot of good researchers become professors to do research but don't give a fuck about teaching. Which sucks for everyone involved.
- adregan 9y ago
  Unfortunately, just because you know your shit, it won't necessarily make you a good teacher. Teaching, to me at least, often felt less about the subject and more about empathy. It's very hard to become a great teacher.
  - adamnemecek 9y ago
    Indeed. But being a professor doesn't mean you are good at teaching either.
    - adregan 9y ago
      Certainly. And that may have something to do with the fact that in some fields of study, teaching is the only way to support yourself, so you get some lack luster teachers.
- dave84 9y ago
  Then it becomes even more of a lifestyle choice for the teacher, if they really know their stuff the only thing that might motivate them to take a huge (at least in my experience) pay cut is the lifestyle.
Ericson2314 9y ago
Deep learning is alchemy so...oh well. Let the next winter fix this. Until then, milk 'em the best you can, grad students!
fatjokes 9y ago
Pay caps? I'm sure the companies would love that; make a legal requirement something they were fined for colluding on.
- Ericson2314 9y ago
  Yeah that is rediculous. Only makes sense for managerial and executive roles due to their non-market-based power. Researchers do not collectively yield that. Edit parent was calling out pay caps and then was editted.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    They do when they are poached and "professionals" are normally lumped in with management for IR/HR purposes
- walshemj 9y ago
  Oh noes we in the UK have paid scientists and engineers poverty wages for generations - now when they are in demand, we want the government to put those boffins and greasy engineers in there place - cant have decent chaps who did a PPE at Oxbridge getting paid less than those middle class oikes
  - peoplewindow 9y ago
    In this case it's not classism, though. The person calling for it is a computer science professor. Her motivation appears to be preventing people leaving her own domain and management hierarchy, rather than engaging in some battle of the backgrounds.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - walshemj 9y ago
      He has been co opted by the establishment this is the same old story favoring broadly the liberal arts over Science and engineering
CJefferson 9y ago
Speaking as an AI researcher (although I don't spend all my time in the current trendy bits), the problem is it seems at the moment what you need to do successful machine learning is: * Lots of data * Lots of CPU/GPU power That's two places where Universities just can't compete with the money which companies can throw at this problem. Also, all AI companies have no interest in working with academia, just taking the staff/students, so there is no useful 2-way communication. EDIT: I just wanted to expand one small point. The data and CPU/GPU power seem to let you research and solve fundamentally different problems. Consider a classic AI technique, like SAT. If you have lots of computers, you can solve bigger SAT problems, but there didn't seem to be an interesting research which required massive clusters of machines, or massive datasets. The big research improvements were all possible on a single reasonable desktop machine, and a selection of commonly available benchmarks.
- _delirium 9y ago
  The CPU/GPU power isn't really out of reach of academic budgets anymore. There are some kinds of problems that are, but AlphaGoZero ran on a box with 4 GPUs, for example, and there is a lot of cutting-edge research with similar computing budgets. It's more DIY though. You have to spec out and buy your hardware, maintain it, etc. (or a grad student does that in their "spare time"), while if you work in AI at Google all the hardware and networking and such is in most cases left to professionals.
  - schaefer 9y ago
    the assertion that alpha go zero ran on a box with four GPUs is not accurate. alpha go zero ran on a box with four TPUs[1]. Those of us on the outside (of google's ai research program) don't have access to that hardware. [1] TPU: tensor processing unit. [1] https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/ https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/
  - netheril96 9y ago
    AlphaGoZero runs on 4 TPUs not GPUs. And that is only for inference, not for training. For training it uses 64 GPUs. More importantly, AlphaGoZero is the final evolution. To reach this stage one needs to experiment a lot, and most of the experiments are failures. To do any meaningful research requires a budget of several times or dozens of times the amount of computing power, and this is only for one project. The computation resources at universities are definitely not sufficient.
away2017throw 9y ago
Always puts a smile on my face when a smart person gets the money he deserves!
- mamp 9y ago
  Even bigger smile if she gets the money he deserves :-)
  - JCharante 9y ago
    Are you saying she deserves less money than he does?
  - away2017throw 9y ago
    Up to him whether to marry and get divorced! Jokes aside in 2017 I should use he/she/they/it and I am just not brain damaged enough to do that every time.
jdhn 9y ago
This reminds me of what happened during the fracking boom in North Dakota. Students in school who were learning how to drive or repair trucks would complete about half the course, and then leave because the pay was phenomenal. Eventually instructors started leaving as well due to the huge bump in pay they could make. Personally, I think that Professor Shanahan did the best thing. He gets a major pay raise while still retaining his scholastic position which he can fall back on in case his private sector job goes kaput.
k2xl 9y ago
Many of these top tier students are moving to the big companies not just because of the salary, but also because they often have resources that is better than any university can offer. I don't think innovation is being stifled. Every week there is a new amazing publication on AI/ML, but instead of coming from University it sometimes comes from DeepMind , Google, FB, etc... If you want to research self driving cars, wouldn't you want to work at Google which has tons of data?
- CJefferson 9y ago
  The problem is, all this company research is locked behind secrets and patents. No-one outside Google knows how deepmind works. No-one can reproduce it.
  - mathgenius 9y ago
    They published their Go algorithms in Nature. Also they put stuff into NIPS. So I don't think this qualifies as "No-one outside Google knows how deepmind works." If their stuff can't be reproduced, then it isn't science and the journals shouldn't be accepting papers from them. Or am I not understanding something?
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Try getting the training dataset they used. For anything, actually. They train all their networks on data taken from users, and publish neither the data nor the models. And the scientific world doesn't have the resources to replicate anything close to it.
      - mathgenius 9y ago
        Alpha Go (the earlier versions) was trained on publicly available games.
        kuschku 9y ago
        That is a lucky case then, because for their NLP projects nothing is publicly available. It's quite annoying if you can't get anything.
mrkstu 9y ago
Industry is going to have to be careful not to eat their seed corn. There won’t be high quality candidates for the next round of hires if they remove the best professors from circulation.
- ragebol 9y ago
  And triggering another AI winter? An AI winter because the current state of the art is valuable and applicable enough
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  The tragedy of the commons applies in full force. Each company is just negligibly affected by their own behavior.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    Each company is positively affected by their own behavior, and negatively by everyone else's. It's a tragedy of the commons, yes, but traditionally we've used government to handle these. Would that be desirable here? What form would it take, even?
- mannigfaltig 9y ago
  I doubt this will be a real problem because I've seen brilliant people excel in provincial universities with very little means and talent around. Internet education has gotten pretty good and probably reflects most of the experience of studying at a top university with the best researchers in the field. People might be 5% worse prepared. Nothing to be concerned about.
- afarrell 9y ago
  If industry wants better teaching, is acedemia the best set of institutions to support? To what degree is it true that focusing on teaching over research is a ticket to tenure denial? (If someone can provide broader context on https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-science-ben-hescott-denied-tenure-students-alumni-respond-negatively/ https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-sc... and http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N28/tenure.html http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N28/tenure.html, I would be grateful.)
notyourday 9y ago
Let me see if I can summarize the response: HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME. Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their slaves to those who make slaves lives better. Schools want to retain talent? Pay it more money. It is that simple. Can't afford it? Maybe you should spend less money on salaries of professors ( who need those slaves to actually do the work ), administrators, fancy buildings, marketing, sports programs, etc. None of the professors would take 4/5s pay cut and stay, why should those who do the work? Everything else is secondary.
- sevensor 9y ago
  As a former grad student, I strogly sympathize with the urge to get the hell out of there and make real money. But on the flip side, I'm pretty dubious about the idea of abandoning your program just because the grass is greener in industry. The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops?
  - notyourday 9y ago
    Same as for anyone else 2-5 years of experience in real company, doing real stuff, making real money. That train ended? Migrate to a slightly different field.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      What if you're really interested in your subject? To be fair, if you're not then there's little reason to start a PhD and it makes perfect sense to drop out of it and go do something else... Btw, it's also perfectly possible to start a PhD after a few years of work in the industry. Not everyone goes on to have more studies right after graduating.
      - notyourday 9y ago
sevensor 9y ago
Like jdhn elsewhere in this thread, this reminds me of recent history. I was an undergrad in computer engineering during the dot-com boom, and classmates would vanish halfway through, having been lured away by fat paychecks. I spent 1999 and 2000 wondering if I was making the wrong move by sticking it out. By the end of 2001 I was pretty happy with my decision.
ptero 9y ago
I do not see such a big problem. There are always hot technologies (that sometimes turn into fads) for which industry tries to grab anyone they can find. This happened before (dotcoms, oil/fracking, synthetic bio, etc.) and will surely happen again. Those do not make a major negative society impact because they tend to be narrow -- e.g., the current one sweeps in just AI/ML, not all of CS. This means that while there are a few minor short term disruptions (e.g., a new student might find a scarcity of professors in his #1 choice area for a year or two), it opens up a bunch of opportunities, too (tenure spots, grants, etc.) and in the super-competitive world of modern research universities they quickly get a bunch of qualified applications. My 2c -- best of luck to those who move to industry, but society impact will be minimal if any 10 years down the road.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
I've always been curious -- what's the best way for people in industry to help with this problem? I'm not going to compete for a lottery ticket to take a huge pay cut to go work as a professor, with fewer resources and a worse schedule than even mid-level SDEs have. That's clearly not a workable solution for having the best and brightest train the next generations. But I am concerned by the prospect of a brain drain in the training pipeline and am interested in helping with that. What are viable strategies to try and share some expertise back from industry? Setting aside for a moment if my employer would agree or not, what should I even be pushing for as a collaboration/training program?
alvis 9y ago
As an Imperial's PhD and having spent couple of years doing research there, I can say that big salary is not essentially the main factor. Certainly it is a factor, but probably not as big as Pantic thought. The most important factor is the environment. All researchers love an environment which encourages idea exchange. But the university (& the department) doesn't seem to see the point. The environment is not comfortable to work in to begin with, not to be mention about productivity and exchange, though, to be fair, it is a common problems across all academic institutions. So, if you want to keep them, give them a good environment please.
wolfgke 9y ago
To me the solution seems simple: if you were to ask some AI scientist whether he is still willing to work for the university, too, i.e. give lectures (but as block course, so that is is compatible with the job requirements of the main job) and additionally has the option to get a tenured position anytime, I believe there are few that would not agree. The problem rather is: - Why require the scientist to invest a lot of time (thus opportunity cost) before they can get (very unlikely) a tenured position when they have the alternative to earn lots of money in industry now? - Even if they are somewhat idealistic and would actually like to give lectures - why not offer a format such as block courses (this format is not uncommon in Germany) that fits better the industrial obligations than one lecture per week over a semester? I believe both issues can easily be solved by the university without having to invest lots of money.
LeifCarrotson 9y ago
> He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. > “He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.” Glassdoor suggests that a salary for a machine learning or natural language processing engineer at Apple averages about $125k. It's not like "6 figures" means $999,999. ...And this was five times the salary that the professor could offer, implying the grad student was valued at $25,000 a year. Here are Imperial's salary guidelines [1]. Given that the student was one year prior to their PhD, it appears they were capped at £35,850, which is closer to $47k, so maybe Apple paid $250k, but $47k is still not as much as the person is obviously worth. And then she advocates pay caps. The reason that private industry is willing to pay these people so much is not some nefarious desire to monopolize the skills and outputs. It's because their work is able to generate value in excess of that salary. Universities need to offer professors and grad students a job with a value - salaries, benefits, and investment in their future - that makes it worthwhile for them to work there. They've been able to mistreat altruistically minded students who don't know what they're worth, and allow shortfalls in their education so they lack the skills to function effectively in the workplace, but while that may work in some sectors AI scientists are currently so valuable that it's not using. Let's fix the universities, not place blame on the companies who are hiring the scientists out of those universities. [1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/hr/public/salaries/job-families/AR---London-SP-Rates---2017-18.pdf http://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administrat...
- Mtinie 9y ago
  A “six figure” salary indicates 100,000 to 999,999 of whatever currency. It does not automatically represent the very top-end of the range. 999,999+ would be “seven figure”, the university in this case can only off low- to mid- five figure salaries.
- tomwphillips 9y ago
  Those rates are for employees of the college. PhD students aren't employees. PhD students in the UK typically receive a stipend from their research council. For 2017/18 it's £14,553 [1]. You don't pay national insurance or income tax on a stipend. I lived in London on such a stipend for four years. It's tough. [1]: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/skills/training/ http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/skills/training/
top256 9y ago
it's comparing apple to oranges. At the risk of stating the obvious, academia is not a good way to get rich imho. That is hardly new :)
kryptiskt 9y ago
This is great, the usual problem in academia is senior faculty clogging all the positions and blocking young researchers.
limaoscarjuliet 9y ago
Flip side: if AI research is hurt, AI will not take over the World anymore! :)
Lazare 9y ago
Traditionally, universities have paid less, but competed by offering an excellent environment, working conditions, tenure, etc. More recently, the working environments of most universities have become much much worse; even exploitative. Tenure is much harder to get, more and more classes are taught by part time adjuncts, the administration bureaucracy becomes ever larger and more powerful. Horror stories are everywhere: The frantic scramble for jobs, the poverty wages, the professors sleeping in their cars or turning to prostitution to make ends meet, the politicised witch hunts, the grinding bureaucracy. In Pantic's story, their student was probably hired way for a salary in the $125k-$250k range. Yes, that's high, yes it's more than a university is probably able or willing to offer. But a lot of people are not motivated only (or even primarily) by money. If you pick a top phd candidate, and make it clear to him that there is a real, viable path towards him obtaining tenure, making maybe $60-80k, having a well equipped lab, and having grad students of his own, and that he'll be a respected, high status individual in the campus hierarchy...many, many people would take that deal in a heartbeat. And that is something which was on offer 40 years ago, and is not an offer now, but could be. (Universities are still well funded; what's changed is the priorities.) There's no shortage of people who want to be academics; the problem is that the deal being offered to them today is terrible; it's no surprise that the few who have compelling options outside academia are tempted. Boiling it down to being all about money is tempting, but I think it missed the point. If the Guardian had bothered to track the student in the story down, I suspect money would be a part of it, but only a part. And maybe not the largest part either.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > If the Guardian had bothered to track the student in the story down Good point. Sometimes "both sides" journalism is ridiculous, but in this case it's very relevant and they didn't even have an "X couldn't be reached for comment". As you say, the academic environment is only suitable for people who really want to be there and can put up with the terrible pay, uncertainty and lack of choice. If you're not interested in that then there are few good reasons to do a PhD, as it's essentially an extended work-sample interview for the process. This isn't even an entirely new problem. The finance industry has been offering people much better pay for certain kinds of maths for decades.
- 9y ago
nshm 9y ago
Universities should sell scientists like clubs sell soccer players - best ones for many millions. That would help to support the rest ;)
pfortuny 9y ago
The consequence of turning academia into a competition against private companies. No more no less.
jhbadger 9y ago
This happened in the 1990s too. With any sort of computational talent not just AI. Professors were leaving for industry all over. But then 1) the dot-com bust happened 2) A lot of former academics realized that despite the nice salary, working on a platform to sell pet food online or whatever wasn't exactly intellectually stimulating. So it sorted itself out in the end.
driusan 9y ago
For pretty much my whole life universities have been telling people that they need to go to university to get a better job (where "better" == "higher paid", sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly phrased that way.) I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've heard anyone phrase university in terms of civics or pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge or anything other than "you need to go to university to get a better job." This seems to be a case of them getting angry at people for having listened to them. If you tell people that the reason to go to university is to find a higher paying job, it's not their fault if they don't value your university once they find a higher paying job.
hourislate 9y ago
I know this was a UK School but when a University can pay a football coach several million a year but can't pay a doctoral student doing research a living wage, well there is a problem. I just wish the Apple, Facebook, Amazon, MSFT, Google could get together somehow and provide an alternative to the system we have now. The disruption would be welcomed among the millions of students and tax payers with open arms.
rdlecler1 9y ago
Not only Univiseristies, but startups are at risk. If I develop AI talent and then Google steals them away with a $500k signing bonus what will this do to the startup ecosystem?
- notyourday 9y ago
  HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME
BeetleB 9y ago
Every so many days we get a submission on how difficult it is to get a TT faculty position at any university, let alone a top one. We keep hearing how saturated academia is. So why the concern here? What will these PhD students gain by staying, when it is so saturated? It appears this is more about tenured professors not being able to pump out papers as easily as they could in the past. For them, the students are merely tools to do so. As someone else commented: Where is the student's perspective in this piece? Many, many PhD students, if given a much better prospect at a TT position at a university, would reject large salary offers.
fatjokes 9y ago
I work in the field of machine vision where Maja Pantic also contributes. It's deeply disturbing to hear her say that. I don't know how she treats her grad students but proposing that their pay be limited so she can keep them like serfs is infuriating and really says a lot about the professor/PhD-student relationship.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
In the UK, a degree is four years, a PhD three and a Master's one so I don't see the big advantage of leaving your studies right now to go work in the industry. Why not wait to get your degree, then negotiate an even bigger salary, with it at hand? I guess there's a huge amount of hype about statistical machine learning right now and some people will think they 'd better capitalise on it while it lasts. Still, that's short-termist. If they hype ends soon, the majority of those students leaving their degrees will find themselves out of work _and_ without a degree. If the hype doesn't end soon then there's no need to rush. So in any case, there's no need to rush. You'll get a better long-term deal if you stay where you are.
julianmarq 9y ago
Just throwing this out there, and it might be overly optimistic and even utopic, but wouldn't laxer intellectual property laws help with this? It could mean that these people could share (more of) their work, no matter where they're working.
nanodano 9y ago
It's the same reason they can't get good security experts to teach at universities. There was a study of 121 top universities and none of the top 10 require a course, top 3 didn't even offer an elective. Only 3 of the top 50 required a single security course. https://www.cloudpassage.com/company/press-releases/cloudpassage-study-finds-u-s-universities-failing-cybersecurity-education/ https://www.cloudpassage.com/company/press-releases/cloudpas...
RestlessMind 9y ago
> Beyond getting the companies to pay their taxes, Pantic said the government might have to consider pay caps... Today, you are losing top talent to another company in your country. Tomorrow with that kind of attitude and "solutions", you will lose them to another country. For better or worse, money is one of the top motivators and the society just has to deal with it.
tbhoc 9y ago
The article is very dramatized and partly fictional. Pantic had no students that left for Apple, dropped their PhD at the last year or earn 100k.

112 points by sasvari 9y ago

The idea of a university needs to be restructured. Maybe this will motivate them to do so. E.g. unbundling would be a great idea. Also make teaching a class less of a lifestyle choice and more of a "we made sure this person knows his/her shit". Taking classes from people who have a lot of industry experience would be dope. Also setup research institutes like Inria of fraunhofer. a lot of good researchers become professors to do research but don't give a fuck about teaching. Which sucks for everyone involved.

adregan 9y ago
Unfortunately, just because you know your shit, it won't necessarily make you a good teacher. Teaching, to me at least, often felt less about the subject and more about empathy. It's very hard to become a great teacher.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Indeed. But being a professor doesn't mean you are good at teaching either.
  - adregan 9y ago
    Certainly. And that may have something to do with the fact that in some fields of study, teaching is the only way to support yourself, so you get some lack luster teachers.
dave84 9y ago
Then it becomes even more of a lifestyle choice for the teacher, if they really know their stuff the only thing that might motivate them to take a huge (at least in my experience) pay cut is the lifestyle.

Ericson2314 9y ago

Deep learning is alchemy so...oh well. Let the next winter fix this. Until then, milk 'em the best you can, grad students!

fatjokes 9y ago

Pay caps? I'm sure the companies would love that; make a legal requirement something they were fined for colluding on.

Ericson2314 9y ago
Yeah that is rediculous. Only makes sense for managerial and executive roles due to their non-market-based power. Researchers do not collectively yield that. Edit parent was calling out pay caps and then was editted.
- walshemj 9y ago
  They do when they are poached and "professionals" are normally lumped in with management for IR/HR purposes
walshemj 9y ago
Oh noes we in the UK have paid scientists and engineers poverty wages for generations - now when they are in demand, we want the government to put those boffins and greasy engineers in there place - cant have decent chaps who did a PPE at Oxbridge getting paid less than those middle class oikes
- peoplewindow 9y ago
  In this case it's not classism, though. The person calling for it is a computer science professor. Her motivation appears to be preventing people leaving her own domain and management hierarchy, rather than engaging in some battle of the backgrounds.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - walshemj 9y ago
    He has been co opted by the establishment this is the same old story favoring broadly the liberal arts over Science and engineering

CJefferson 9y ago

Speaking as an AI researcher (although I don't spend all my time in the current trendy bits), the problem is it seems at the moment what you need to do successful machine learning is: * Lots of data * Lots of CPU/GPU power That's two places where Universities just can't compete with the money which companies can throw at this problem. Also, all AI companies have no interest in working with academia, just taking the staff/students, so there is no useful 2-way communication. EDIT: I just wanted to expand one small point. The data and CPU/GPU power seem to let you research and solve fundamentally different problems. Consider a classic AI technique, like SAT. If you have lots of computers, you can solve bigger SAT problems, but there didn't seem to be an interesting research which required massive clusters of machines, or massive datasets. The big research improvements were all possible on a single reasonable desktop machine, and a selection of commonly available benchmarks.

_delirium 9y ago
The CPU/GPU power isn't really out of reach of academic budgets anymore. There are some kinds of problems that are, but AlphaGoZero ran on a box with 4 GPUs, for example, and there is a lot of cutting-edge research with similar computing budgets. It's more DIY though. You have to spec out and buy your hardware, maintain it, etc. (or a grad student does that in their "spare time"), while if you work in AI at Google all the hardware and networking and such is in most cases left to professionals.
- schaefer 9y ago
  the assertion that alpha go zero ran on a box with four GPUs is not accurate. alpha go zero ran on a box with four TPUs[1]. Those of us on the outside (of google's ai research program) don't have access to that hardware. [1] TPU: tensor processing unit. [1] https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/ https://deepmind.com/blog/alphago-zero-learning-scratch/
- netheril96 9y ago
  AlphaGoZero runs on 4 TPUs not GPUs. And that is only for inference, not for training. For training it uses 64 GPUs. More importantly, AlphaGoZero is the final evolution. To reach this stage one needs to experiment a lot, and most of the experiments are failures. To do any meaningful research requires a budget of several times or dozens of times the amount of computing power, and this is only for one project. The computation resources at universities are definitely not sufficient.

away2017throw 9y ago

Always puts a smile on my face when a smart person gets the money he deserves!

mamp 9y ago
Even bigger smile if she gets the money he deserves :-)
- JCharante 9y ago
  Are you saying she deserves less money than he does?
- away2017throw 9y ago
  Up to him whether to marry and get divorced! Jokes aside in 2017 I should use he/she/they/it and I am just not brain damaged enough to do that every time.

jdhn 9y ago

This reminds me of what happened during the fracking boom in North Dakota. Students in school who were learning how to drive or repair trucks would complete about half the course, and then leave because the pay was phenomenal. Eventually instructors started leaving as well due to the huge bump in pay they could make. Personally, I think that Professor Shanahan did the best thing. He gets a major pay raise while still retaining his scholastic position which he can fall back on in case his private sector job goes kaput.

k2xl 9y ago

Many of these top tier students are moving to the big companies not just because of the salary, but also because they often have resources that is better than any university can offer. I don't think innovation is being stifled. Every week there is a new amazing publication on AI/ML, but instead of coming from University it sometimes comes from DeepMind , Google, FB, etc... If you want to research self driving cars, wouldn't you want to work at Google which has tons of data?

CJefferson 9y ago
The problem is, all this company research is locked behind secrets and patents. No-one outside Google knows how deepmind works. No-one can reproduce it.
- mathgenius 9y ago
  They published their Go algorithms in Nature. Also they put stuff into NIPS. So I don't think this qualifies as "No-one outside Google knows how deepmind works." If their stuff can't be reproduced, then it isn't science and the journals shouldn't be accepting papers from them. Or am I not understanding something?
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Try getting the training dataset they used. For anything, actually. They train all their networks on data taken from users, and publish neither the data nor the models. And the scientific world doesn't have the resources to replicate anything close to it.
    - mathgenius 9y ago
      Alpha Go (the earlier versions) was trained on publicly available games.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        That is a lucky case then, because for their NLP projects nothing is publicly available. It's quite annoying if you can't get anything.

mrkstu 9y ago

Industry is going to have to be careful not to eat their seed corn. There won’t be high quality candidates for the next round of hires if they remove the best professors from circulation.

ragebol 9y ago
And triggering another AI winter? An AI winter because the current state of the art is valuable and applicable enough
emiliobumachar 9y ago
The tragedy of the commons applies in full force. Each company is just negligibly affected by their own behavior.
- Filligree 9y ago
  Each company is positively affected by their own behavior, and negatively by everyone else's. It's a tragedy of the commons, yes, but traditionally we've used government to handle these. Would that be desirable here? What form would it take, even?
mannigfaltig 9y ago
I doubt this will be a real problem because I've seen brilliant people excel in provincial universities with very little means and talent around. Internet education has gotten pretty good and probably reflects most of the experience of studying at a top university with the best researchers in the field. People might be 5% worse prepared. Nothing to be concerned about.
afarrell 9y ago
If industry wants better teaching, is acedemia the best set of institutions to support? To what degree is it true that focusing on teaching over research is a ticket to tenure denial? (If someone can provide broader context on https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-science-ben-hescott-denied-tenure-students-alumni-respond-negatively/ https://tuftsdaily.com/news/2017/08/29/professor-computer-sc... and http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N28/tenure.html http://tech.mit.edu/V130/N28/tenure.html, I would be grateful.)

notyourday 9y ago

Let me see if I can summarize the response: HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME. Very few things grind my gears more than academic fat cats whining about losing their slaves to those who make slaves lives better. Schools want to retain talent? Pay it more money. It is that simple. Can't afford it? Maybe you should spend less money on salaries of professors ( who need those slaves to actually do the work ), administrators, fancy buildings, marketing, sports programs, etc. None of the professors would take 4/5s pay cut and stay, why should those who do the work? Everything else is secondary.

sevensor 9y ago
As a former grad student, I strogly sympathize with the urge to get the hell out of there and make real money. But on the flip side, I'm pretty dubious about the idea of abandoning your program just because the grass is greener in industry. The Ph.D. improves your chances of getting to work on interesting problems down the road, even if you leave academia. Selling that out for a few years of big money isn't something that should be done lightly. Especially when we're in the middle of such an obvious bubble -- what's the plan for 2-5 years from now when it pops?
- notyourday 9y ago
  Same as for anyone else 2-5 years of experience in real company, doing real stuff, making real money. That train ended? Migrate to a slightly different field.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    What if you're really interested in your subject? To be fair, if you're not then there's little reason to start a PhD and it makes perfect sense to drop out of it and go do something else... Btw, it's also perfectly possible to start a PhD after a few years of work in the industry. Not everyone goes on to have more studies right after graduating.
    - notyourday 9y ago

sevensor 9y ago

Like jdhn elsewhere in this thread, this reminds me of recent history. I was an undergrad in computer engineering during the dot-com boom, and classmates would vanish halfway through, having been lured away by fat paychecks. I spent 1999 and 2000 wondering if I was making the wrong move by sticking it out. By the end of 2001 I was pretty happy with my decision.

ptero 9y ago

I do not see such a big problem. There are always hot technologies (that sometimes turn into fads) for which industry tries to grab anyone they can find. This happened before (dotcoms, oil/fracking, synthetic bio, etc.) and will surely happen again. Those do not make a major negative society impact because they tend to be narrow -- e.g., the current one sweeps in just AI/ML, not all of CS. This means that while there are a few minor short term disruptions (e.g., a new student might find a scarcity of professors in his #1 choice area for a year or two), it opens up a bunch of opportunities, too (tenure spots, grants, etc.) and in the super-competitive world of modern research universities they quickly get a bunch of qualified applications. My 2c -- best of luck to those who move to industry, but society impact will be minimal if any 10 years down the road.

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago

I've always been curious -- what's the best way for people in industry to help with this problem? I'm not going to compete for a lottery ticket to take a huge pay cut to go work as a professor, with fewer resources and a worse schedule than even mid-level SDEs have. That's clearly not a workable solution for having the best and brightest train the next generations. But I am concerned by the prospect of a brain drain in the training pipeline and am interested in helping with that. What are viable strategies to try and share some expertise back from industry? Setting aside for a moment if my employer would agree or not, what should I even be pushing for as a collaboration/training program?

alvis 9y ago

As an Imperial's PhD and having spent couple of years doing research there, I can say that big salary is not essentially the main factor. Certainly it is a factor, but probably not as big as Pantic thought. The most important factor is the environment. All researchers love an environment which encourages idea exchange. But the university (& the department) doesn't seem to see the point. The environment is not comfortable to work in to begin with, not to be mention about productivity and exchange, though, to be fair, it is a common problems across all academic institutions. So, if you want to keep them, give them a good environment please.

wolfgke 9y ago

To me the solution seems simple: if you were to ask some AI scientist whether he is still willing to work for the university, too, i.e. give lectures (but as block course, so that is is compatible with the job requirements of the main job) and additionally has the option to get a tenured position anytime, I believe there are few that would not agree. The problem rather is: - Why require the scientist to invest a lot of time (thus opportunity cost) before they can get (very unlikely) a tenured position when they have the alternative to earn lots of money in industry now? - Even if they are somewhat idealistic and would actually like to give lectures - why not offer a format such as block courses (this format is not uncommon in Germany) that fits better the industrial obligations than one lecture per week over a semester? I believe both issues can easily be solved by the university without having to invest lots of money.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

> He had left for a six-figure salary at Apple. > “He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.” Glassdoor suggests that a salary for a machine learning or natural language processing engineer at Apple averages about $125k. It's not like "6 figures" means $999,999. ...And this was five times the salary that the professor could offer, implying the grad student was valued at $25,000 a year. Here are Imperial's salary guidelines [1]. Given that the student was one year prior to their PhD, it appears they were capped at £35,850, which is closer to $47k, so maybe Apple paid $250k, but $47k is still not as much as the person is obviously worth. And then she advocates pay caps. The reason that private industry is willing to pay these people so much is not some nefarious desire to monopolize the skills and outputs. It's because their work is able to generate value in excess of that salary. Universities need to offer professors and grad students a job with a value - salaries, benefits, and investment in their future - that makes it worthwhile for them to work there. They've been able to mistreat altruistically minded students who don't know what they're worth, and allow shortfalls in their education so they lack the skills to function effectively in the workplace, but while that may work in some sectors AI scientists are currently so valuable that it's not using. Let's fix the universities, not place blame on the companies who are hiring the scientists out of those universities. [1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administration-and-support-services/hr/public/salaries/job-families/AR---London-SP-Rates---2017-18.pdf http://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administrat...

Mtinie 9y ago
A “six figure” salary indicates 100,000 to 999,999 of whatever currency. It does not automatically represent the very top-end of the range. 999,999+ would be “seven figure”, the university in this case can only off low- to mid- five figure salaries.
tomwphillips 9y ago
Those rates are for employees of the college. PhD students aren't employees. PhD students in the UK typically receive a stipend from their research council. For 2017/18 it's £14,553 [1]. You don't pay national insurance or income tax on a stipend. I lived in London on such a stipend for four years. It's tough. [1]: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/skills/training/ http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/skills/training/

top256 9y ago

it's comparing apple to oranges. At the risk of stating the obvious, academia is not a good way to get rich imho. That is hardly new :)

kryptiskt 9y ago

This is great, the usual problem in academia is senior faculty clogging all the positions and blocking young researchers.

limaoscarjuliet 9y ago

Flip side: if AI research is hurt, AI will not take over the World anymore! :)

Lazare 9y ago

Traditionally, universities have paid less, but competed by offering an excellent environment, working conditions, tenure, etc. More recently, the working environments of most universities have become much much worse; even exploitative. Tenure is much harder to get, more and more classes are taught by part time adjuncts, the administration bureaucracy becomes ever larger and more powerful. Horror stories are everywhere: The frantic scramble for jobs, the poverty wages, the professors sleeping in their cars or turning to prostitution to make ends meet, the politicised witch hunts, the grinding bureaucracy. In Pantic's story, their student was probably hired way for a salary in the $125k-$250k range. Yes, that's high, yes it's more than a university is probably able or willing to offer. But a lot of people are not motivated only (or even primarily) by money. If you pick a top phd candidate, and make it clear to him that there is a real, viable path towards him obtaining tenure, making maybe $60-80k, having a well equipped lab, and having grad students of his own, and that he'll be a respected, high status individual in the campus hierarchy...many, many people would take that deal in a heartbeat. And that is something which was on offer 40 years ago, and is not an offer now, but could be. (Universities are still well funded; what's changed is the priorities.) There's no shortage of people who want to be academics; the problem is that the deal being offered to them today is terrible; it's no surprise that the few who have compelling options outside academia are tempted. Boiling it down to being all about money is tempting, but I think it missed the point. If the Guardian had bothered to track the student in the story down, I suspect money would be a part of it, but only a part. And maybe not the largest part either.

pjc50 9y ago
> If the Guardian had bothered to track the student in the story down Good point. Sometimes "both sides" journalism is ridiculous, but in this case it's very relevant and they didn't even have an "X couldn't be reached for comment". As you say, the academic environment is only suitable for people who really want to be there and can put up with the terrible pay, uncertainty and lack of choice. If you're not interested in that then there are few good reasons to do a PhD, as it's essentially an extended work-sample interview for the process. This isn't even an entirely new problem. The finance industry has been offering people much better pay for certain kinds of maths for decades.
9y ago

nshm 9y ago

Universities should sell scientists like clubs sell soccer players - best ones for many millions. That would help to support the rest ;)

pfortuny 9y ago

The consequence of turning academia into a competition against private companies. No more no less.

jhbadger 9y ago

This happened in the 1990s too. With any sort of computational talent not just AI. Professors were leaving for industry all over. But then 1) the dot-com bust happened 2) A lot of former academics realized that despite the nice salary, working on a platform to sell pet food online or whatever wasn't exactly intellectually stimulating. So it sorted itself out in the end.

driusan 9y ago

For pretty much my whole life universities have been telling people that they need to go to university to get a better job (where "better" == "higher paid", sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly phrased that way.) I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've heard anyone phrase university in terms of civics or pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge or anything other than "you need to go to university to get a better job." This seems to be a case of them getting angry at people for having listened to them. If you tell people that the reason to go to university is to find a higher paying job, it's not their fault if they don't value your university once they find a higher paying job.

hourislate 9y ago

I know this was a UK School but when a University can pay a football coach several million a year but can't pay a doctoral student doing research a living wage, well there is a problem. I just wish the Apple, Facebook, Amazon, MSFT, Google could get together somehow and provide an alternative to the system we have now. The disruption would be welcomed among the millions of students and tax payers with open arms.

rdlecler1 9y ago

Not only Univiseristies, but startups are at risk. If I develop AI talent and then Google steals them away with a $500k signing bonus what will this do to the startup ecosystem?

notyourday 9y ago
HTTP/1.1 402 F_YOU. PAY_ME

BeetleB 9y ago

Every so many days we get a submission on how difficult it is to get a TT faculty position at any university, let alone a top one. We keep hearing how saturated academia is. So why the concern here? What will these PhD students gain by staying, when it is so saturated? It appears this is more about tenured professors not being able to pump out papers as easily as they could in the past. For them, the students are merely tools to do so. As someone else commented: Where is the student's perspective in this piece? Many, many PhD students, if given a much better prospect at a TT position at a university, would reject large salary offers.

fatjokes 9y ago

I work in the field of machine vision where Maja Pantic also contributes. It's deeply disturbing to hear her say that. I don't know how she treats her grad students but proposing that their pay be limited so she can keep them like serfs is infuriating and really says a lot about the professor/PhD-student relationship.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

In the UK, a degree is four years, a PhD three and a Master's one so I don't see the big advantage of leaving your studies right now to go work in the industry. Why not wait to get your degree, then negotiate an even bigger salary, with it at hand? I guess there's a huge amount of hype about statistical machine learning right now and some people will think they 'd better capitalise on it while it lasts. Still, that's short-termist. If they hype ends soon, the majority of those students leaving their degrees will find themselves out of work _and_ without a degree. If the hype doesn't end soon then there's no need to rush. So in any case, there's no need to rush. You'll get a better long-term deal if you stay where you are.

julianmarq 9y ago

Just throwing this out there, and it might be overly optimistic and even utopic, but wouldn't laxer intellectual property laws help with this? It could mean that these people could share (more of) their work, no matter where they're working.

nanodano 9y ago

It's the same reason they can't get good security experts to teach at universities. There was a study of 121 top universities and none of the top 10 require a course, top 3 didn't even offer an elective. Only 3 of the top 50 required a single security course. https://www.cloudpassage.com/company/press-releases/cloudpassage-study-finds-u-s-universities-failing-cybersecurity-education/ https://www.cloudpassage.com/company/press-releases/cloudpas...

RestlessMind 9y ago

> Beyond getting the companies to pay their taxes, Pantic said the government might have to consider pay caps... Today, you are losing top talent to another company in your country. Tomorrow with that kind of attitude and "solutions", you will lose them to another country. For better or worse, money is one of the top motivators and the society just has to deal with it.

tbhoc 9y ago

The article is very dramatized and partly fictional. Pantic had no students that left for Apple, dropped their PhD at the last year or earn 100k.