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So your argument is they should stay and work for pennies, hoping to get an "interesting" job in the future, instead of getting an interesting and highly paid j

So your argument is they should stay and work for pennies, hoping to get an "interesting" job in the future, instead of getting an interesting and highly paid job right now? It's also not obvious at all it's a bubble. AI field is already much more complex than the regular CS field, which already suffers from talent shortages. AI is the future, and the demand is here to stay.

Retric 9y ago
AI is currently less complex than many CS fields that pay far less. This is basicly the boom times when most companies want a website but don't have one. Once the obvious applications are built these bubbles tend to burst as matence pays far less.
- nopinsight 9y ago
  Plain vanilla convnets are not very complex. If you look at recent papers on Deep Reinforcement Learning with extra modules or Generative Adversarial Networks from DeepMind and the likes, the complexity is much higher than much of CS used in industry and it is increasing rapidly. More importantly, the performance of many AI implementations could be improved with the increased sophistication, so the demand for such complexity is there for businesses in competitive sectors. Any examples of topics in other fields of CS in practical use that are more complex than recent AI advances with potential practical applications?
  - Retric 9y ago
    I would argue a modern Graphics pipeline is significantly more complex. But, you run into issues of what the borders of a topic is. Lighting for example is a huge topic for research, but it does not mean much on it's own.
wolfgke 9y ago
If universities believe that AI is here to stay, offer tenured positions now to your AI scientists. Universities cannot compete on pay (and I don't think this is bad), but they can compete perfectly well on job security. So play this trump card (no pun intended).
sevensor 9y ago
> It's also not obvious at all it's a bubble It's breathtakingly obvious: 1. Large numbers of people getting poached from academic programs by industry. 2. "This time it's different" is what we've said during every bubble ever. 3. Lots of money chasing a few ideas. The only thing that's not clear about this bubble is when it's going to pop. People who didn't see the potential of the internet in 1996 missed out. People who got into it in 2000 were left holding the bag.
- notyourday 9y ago
  I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double. Five times. Professors/administrators whining about it are pure scum unless they themselves are making one fifth what they would be making in a different university that offered them a job purely because they love this specific college doing the specific research or teaching. What is really pissing off these professors is that with their worker bees gone they themselves would need to do the work - something they are not quite used to.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    > I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: > The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double. Five times. Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I agree with you that grad students are ruthlessly exploited. I've seen that firsthand. I routinely discourage people from doing a Ph.D. for that reason. And if you're not too far along, taking a terminal master's and leaving for industry is a solid option, especially because this AI bubble won't last forever. But if, like the one student in TFA, you have just one year left, quitting grad school is not a great idea. Now you have, at best, an awkwardly long stretch of grad school on your CV with a master's degree on the end of it, and at worst, no degree at all to show for your pains. At that point, just suck it up and finish the degree.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      > Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I do. I'm yet to see people who jumped away from academic CS tracks at the time being upset about their decisions. I do know of dozens degreed people in their late thirties reporting to C students while making quarter of the salary of the same C students.
taway_1212 9y ago
We’ve had AI winters before, who knows if the next one isn’t coming.

Retric 9y ago

AI is currently less complex than many CS fields that pay far less. This is basicly the boom times when most companies want a website but don't have one. Once the obvious applications are built these bubbles tend to burst as matence pays far less.

nopinsight 9y ago
Plain vanilla convnets are not very complex. If you look at recent papers on Deep Reinforcement Learning with extra modules or Generative Adversarial Networks from DeepMind and the likes, the complexity is much higher than much of CS used in industry and it is increasing rapidly. More importantly, the performance of many AI implementations could be improved with the increased sophistication, so the demand for such complexity is there for businesses in competitive sectors. Any examples of topics in other fields of CS in practical use that are more complex than recent AI advances with potential practical applications?
- Retric 9y ago
  I would argue a modern Graphics pipeline is significantly more complex. But, you run into issues of what the borders of a topic is. Lighting for example is a huge topic for research, but it does not mean much on it's own.

wolfgke 9y ago

If universities believe that AI is here to stay, offer tenured positions now to your AI scientists. Universities cannot compete on pay (and I don't think this is bad), but they can compete perfectly well on job security. So play this trump card (no pun intended).

sevensor 9y ago

> It's also not obvious at all it's a bubble It's breathtakingly obvious: 1. Large numbers of people getting poached from academic programs by industry. 2. "This time it's different" is what we've said during every bubble ever. 3. Lots of money chasing a few ideas. The only thing that's not clear about this bubble is when it's going to pop. People who didn't see the potential of the internet in 1996 missed out. People who got into it in 2000 were left holding the bag.

notyourday 9y ago
I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double. Five times. Professors/administrators whining about it are pure scum unless they themselves are making one fifth what they would be making in a different university that offered them a job purely because they love this specific college doing the specific research or teaching. What is really pissing off these professors is that with their worker bees gone they themselves would need to do the work - something they are not quite used to.
- sevensor 9y ago
  > I think you are missing the scale mentioned in the article: > The industry is paying five times what universities are paying. Not Fifty percent. Not double. Five times. Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I agree with you that grad students are ruthlessly exploited. I've seen that firsthand. I routinely discourage people from doing a Ph.D. for that reason. And if you're not too far along, taking a terminal master's and leaving for industry is a solid option, especially because this AI bubble won't last forever. But if, like the one student in TFA, you have just one year left, quitting grad school is not a great idea. Now you have, at best, an awkwardly long stretch of grad school on your CV with a master's degree on the end of it, and at worst, no degree at all to show for your pains. At that point, just suck it up and finish the degree.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > Nope, not missing that. You don't think this happened in 1999-2000? I do. I'm yet to see people who jumped away from academic CS tracks at the time being upset about their decisions. I do know of dozens degreed people in their late thirties reporting to C students while making quarter of the salary of the same C students.

taway_1212 9y ago

We’ve had AI winters before, who knows if the next one isn’t coming.