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I completely agree - People have a right to demand payment (salary, benefits, and - in the context of universities - an oft-overvalued investment in their futu

I completely agree - People have a right to demand payment (salary, benefits, and - in the context of universities - an oft-overvalued investment in their future like academic certification) commensurate with their ability to generate value. Grad students are not getting that. But I think you're overestimating how much these professors are paid. Universities feeling a crunch between their income and the value of their employees on the outside may have chosen to screw over their expendable grad students first, but professors aren't that much farther up the totem pole. Part of the problem, though, is that Apple can use the scientist's skills to generate >>$1M/year in revenue. Private industry will happily pay them $250k/year, hire secretaries and managers to be crap-catchers and crap-umbrellas under and above them respectively so the scientist can be most effective, and otherwise take care of the goose that's laying golden eggs. But the university isn't cashing in on this revenue-generating potential. They're (ostensibly) using the professors and grad students to teach undergrads, and also using them to do research that doesn't generate revenue. The existence and function of the university does provide a valuable service to society, but they're not being appropriately compensated for that service if it's worth so much on the outside - and they're squandering a lot of that societal contribution by letting it be siphoned off to the firms providing the student loans and the administration of the university.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago
To me this sounds like a misallocation of resources between private and public sectors of AI research. Most companies - outside MSR and DeepMind - largely fund applied AI research, usually towards better classifiers for vision tasks, better predictive regression for recommenders, self-driving cars, etc. Most universities keep academics on for basic research: things machines can't do yet that people can. The latter obviously leads to the former, but actually receives a great deal less funding. The former, after all, gets the deep pockets of multi-billion-dollar companies, while the latter relies on various national science agencies.
- criddell 9y ago
  A university might be willing to fund basic research, but they have to compete with industry for the researcher.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    It is fairly amusing that the universities want to pretend that "salary" part should be nearly zero for those who work on a research at the universities.
epmaybe 9y ago
Universities are definitely trying to cash in on the revenue generating potential of researchers. There are number of universities that have recently changed their stance on intellectual property rights so that the inventors retain most of the ownership and profits of their invention. This is to try and jumpstart innovation, as previously inventors at universities were reluctant to disclose due to getting very little out of it.

eli_gottlieb 9y ago

To me this sounds like a misallocation of resources between private and public sectors of AI research. Most companies - outside MSR and DeepMind - largely fund applied AI research, usually towards better classifiers for vision tasks, better predictive regression for recommenders, self-driving cars, etc. Most universities keep academics on for basic research: things machines can't do yet that people can. The latter obviously leads to the former, but actually receives a great deal less funding. The former, after all, gets the deep pockets of multi-billion-dollar companies, while the latter relies on various national science agencies.

criddell 9y ago
A university might be willing to fund basic research, but they have to compete with industry for the researcher.
- notyourday 9y ago
  It is fairly amusing that the universities want to pretend that "salary" part should be nearly zero for those who work on a research at the universities.

epmaybe 9y ago

Universities are definitely trying to cash in on the revenue generating potential of researchers. There are number of universities that have recently changed their stance on intellectual property rights so that the inventors retain most of the ownership and profits of their invention. This is to try and jumpstart innovation, as previously inventors at universities were reluctant to disclose due to getting very little out of it.