> can they pay professors in different departments very different amounts In the US this is already common. But salaries in AI (and to a lesser extent CS in ge

> can they pay professors in different departments very different amounts In the US this is already common. But salaries in AI (and to a lesser extent CS in general) have recently gotten high enough that you'd need much bigger differentials, plus you start getting to absolute salary numbers that become unaffordable to all but a handful of places. An early-career academic at a top university might make, say, $60-80k in the humanities versus $100-130k in CS, but companies will pay $150k+. A prominent tenured professor in CS can make $200k+ in some cases in recent years, but if you believe recent reports [1], senior AI researchers are being paid $1m+ outside of academia, which seems really unlikely to be matched. I'm not sure it's necessarily a problem per se, though. Depends on what your goals are. As a fairly junior CS academic, it's good for me personally. CS faculty jobs are now much easier to come by than is usually the case in academia (look at the nightmare stories of physicists and biologists doing 10-year postdocs trying to land a tenure-track position). And pay has risen enough that it's now pretty good, even if still not as good as industry. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-int...