10 ms·

Why I chose OpenAI over academia

144 points by bilsbie 4y ago

texaslonghorn5 4y ago
This and part 1 are interesting reads. > The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research. I think this is the key point. I've heard similar from friends in industry and academic positions.
- goethes_kind 4y ago
  The hardware resources are there. I for example have access to clusters with hundreds of A100. The engineering resources are not though. The work has to either be done by the Phds themselves or by student workers. Phds don't have enough time and student workers have very little time and no expertise. There are some limited SWE positions in support roles, but as you can expect the pay is not competitive. For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap.
  - secabeen 4y ago
    We are starting to build up the field of research facilitation, but it's hard to bring together permanent funding for things like this; quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years, and most universities don't have the culture to put the necessary central funding forward at the scale required. > For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap. Billion euro clusters are one-time money; people expect benefits and durable employment.
    - indigochill 4y ago
      Haven't national research labs solved this problem? Nobody I talked to at APL seemed to have any concern about shortage of R&D opportunities and although it wasn't Silicon Valley money (which is not sustainable long-term anyway), I don't recall anyone complaining about the salary either.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        If we consider that Silicon Valley started in the 1970s, I'm not sure how much more long term it needs to show to be considered sustainable.
        krageon 4y ago
        I'm assuming they meant sustainable for a single person. The percentage of people holding such a salary long-term could be very low. I don't know whether or not it is, but that is how I read the comment.
      - nl 4y ago
        There was a thread on this on HN last month: "Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?"[1] Most comments note how the pay is less than FAANG; eg the top voted comments: "Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG." And elsewhere: "The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility." etc etc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527
      - secabeen 4y ago
        The national research labs are great, but there are only 17 of those, and they don't employ that many people when compared to the software industry. Good gigs if you can get them, certainly.
    - solarkraft 4y ago
      > quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years I may not be a quality engineer, but I'd be interested. That's a long enough time frame for me. But by what I hear from German academia the pay is bad, the environment is "meh" and the contracts have to be renewed in relatively short periods (yearly?). That makes an otherwise interesting field a hell of a lot harder to choose.
  - sseagull 4y ago
    I am really feeling this now. We are an academic group (sort of) that is looking to stand up a server or so for some public-facing apps and databases, but it's like no one has ever heard of such a thing. They keep giving me servers that are behind a firewall and only accessible on-campus. We could maybe do AWS or Azure, but that is really expensive and not really covered by our (government) funding. Plus, any time you want to do something like that (particularly with a company the university doesn't have an existing contract with), you have to get several layers of bureaucracy (including lawyers sometimes) involved. We are a state school, so you can guess how fast that moves. In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front. (For me, academia is generally ok and fun in my current position, but this part is getting ridiculous)
    - g42gregory 4y ago
      Why not to buy $500k NVIDIA GPU server?
      - sseagull 4y ago
        We’re trying that :) (minus the GPU. Think more like a database/web server). Although to a lot of reviewers a server is a server. “You have a multi-million dollar compute cluster available, what do you need another server for?”
      - throwaway2037 4y ago
        This does not address GP's original concern: <<public-facing apps and databases>>
        xwdv 4y ago
        Buy the $500k server and get a VPN.
    - ftufek 4y ago
      Have you looked into cloudflare tunnels/ngrok? You can expose any service to internet without dealing with ip addresses, firewalls or opening ports, etc. And tailscale can also give you a private access to any resources even if it's behind firewalls and all that (say you want to access the gpu cluster from your laptop at home). And they can all run in user space without elevated privileges.
  - Nimitz14 4y ago
    99% of Unis do not have Hardware like that lol
    - gumby 4y ago
      The R1 tier do; that’s kind of the point. But most aren’t really schools in the normal sense. E.g. MIT is basically a huge research lab with a small undergraduate school bolted on
  - discardable_dan 4y ago
    You have access to a hundred A100s, at a price point of ~8500 each, for $850k. If only you could have half, and spend the other half on labor.
  - oikawa_tooru_ 4y ago
    Damn. What's the university you work at?
  - slowmotiony 4y ago
    A friend of mine is part of the jury that decides on how to distribute millions of euros in EU research grants. There are 6 professors in the jury and the their compensation is exactly 100 euro per decision. You could essentially just make up a bullshit "project", bribe 3 of them with a few thousand bucks and secure yourself a million euro research grant.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Why would professors at the top of their field they sell their integrity for a few thousand dollars?
- jvvw 4y ago
  I've worked as a developer/engineer both in private sector and in a research department at a university (but not AI/ML). There are a couple of problems with working in an academic context. First, as you say the incentive structure is wrong: projects are led by researchers and the incentives for researchers are around publishing not around creating good software. There's virtually no credit for making software that is well-written, robust, has a great user interface etc. Secondly, the funding structure for projects tends to be grant-based. It's extremely hard to get funding for general ongoing development. I saw lots of projects get initial funding for a couple of years, the funding stopped and then the project had no money even for the most basic support or server costs etc. Sometimes you could grant funding for new features and could funnel a bit of that into support but it did require a constant regular stream of grant applications, as often of course you don't get them. My salary was certainly largely funded by grants - I had a permanent job and there was some allowance for gaps between funding to cover that and because of the type of work I was doing I could do some internal work too in those gaps. It's hard to manage funding that comes with short-term grants. You just can't recruit good people to short-term contracts that quickly before they are supposed to start, especially for what universities can pay (in the UK there are set pay scales, so if you don't manage anybody you basically can't be paid more than a certain amount, plus there are strict processes about recruiting, for good reasons, so it's hard to do quickly).
nmca 4y ago
A CEO I worked with once said: "academia is like a burlap sack full of cats with one sardine in it" This seems accurate.
- gdsimoes 4y ago
  And the sardine is poisoned.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
antegamisou 4y ago
Just going by the absurd process of obtaining tenure in a US university, selecting the industry route is a no-brainer considering some restriction in academic freedom (not necessarily always the case though).
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Only an idiot would stay in academia
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Remember to work hard to make value for your shareholders.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      Cool, know what's the equivalent of that in academia? Remember to work hard to please your advisor. But don't forget you get barely no raises. No RSUs/Stock Options. Benefits? What are those? Oh cool, now you have a PhD. Tenure? Best we can do is a 2yr contract...
      - speedgoose 4y ago
        You work on topics you enjoy to improve the society and extend the knowledge of our civilisation ? Your advisor is there to help you, you don't work for them as a slave. Not all people want a carrot that is designed to make them work hard, RSUs/Stock options ? No thanks I will take money and continue having fun without thinking much about accountants stuff such as the company profits. But I agree, some places do not offer great salaries and permanent contracts and it's a big issue.
        raverbashing 4y ago
        I speak from experience, and I'm glad if you don't have similar experiences Working on things that improve society and discovery doesn't have to be done in academic contexts, quite the contrary. A lot of times with more freedom and less BS
29athrowaway 4y ago
[flagged]
- atdrummond 4y ago
  None of the people elected at the local level have any interest in making the city better for everyone. They have their coalition that is large enough to ensure their continued re-election and their terms are served by parceling out sufficient benefits to said coalition partners to guarantee their ongoing support. They now act bewildered that, like Portland, their downtown is dead and shows no sign of improvement in the near term. As the tax base continues to collapse and more pressure is put on existing homeowners/residents, it’ll be interesting to see how the resulting cost of living crisis impacts these coalitions. I suspect things get far, far worse before they get any better.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    If learned helplessness was a city, it would be San Francisco. Public defecation, car break-ins, littering, homelessness, people shooting drugs, needles everywhere, junkies talking gibberish and yelling to hallucinations, etc. What's the point of paying a fortune to live like that?
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - searealist 4y ago
        Just 5 days ago from you: > And good luck not having your bikes get regularly stolen in places like SF or NYC. You better ride the most revolting beater you can find, and even then. If you don't want your bike stolen, then please leave SF.
    - VectorLock 4y ago
      And yet still has some of the highest property values in the country. Curious.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
"my partner and I grew up in the Bay Area, and have parents who live nearby. " yeup. nobody talks about this but its one of the most important things you will ever have to decide in life.
- sva_ 4y ago
  Decisions such as what kind of parents birth you?
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    If you want kids, having parents nearby can be the difference between sanity and insanity.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Can corroborate. And once you have kids in school and a career in one location, it's not going to be trivial to move around. Moved away from family, for work in my 20s, ended up with wife and family. But now even with remote work and the ability for me to work anywhere I want, and a kid with health issues and family could help... moving back to where my parents are (now in their late 70s) isn't a simple option. Means pulling kids from school and friends, wife from my in-laws, it's a whole thing. Think carefully how you start your career in your 20s.
      - blobbers 4y ago
        Yes. Silicon Valley is a trap. You can’t afford to have parents nearby unless they already are (as these folks have) Everything related to families is a cash grab and a SFH in Palo Alto, Peninsula or Cupertino means throwing any hope of early financial freedom. A FAANG job will pay more but for how you can live almost anywhere else in the country, a remote job at 2/3 the salary is much much better.
    - nmfisher 4y ago
      My wife and I live in an entirely different country from both our parents. Our first was born early last year, and my mother-in-law only just got a chance to come and help out for a few weeks. Having family around to help take care of the kids makes a HUGE difference (and not just financially), particularly with two working parents. It's obviously doable without it, but if you have the option, I would strongly advise at least considering moving somewhere close to family who can help out.
dustingetz 4y ago
in the USA it’s been possible to get COL down to sub $50k for a comfortable life and live on 3 mos a year of freelancing mainstream stack stuff, you can focus on long term research indefinitely without distractions. Main downside is can’t live in SF/NY so your project better work out. if you weren’t gonna chase money anyway then what difference does it make?
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Possible? Most Americans spend significantly less than 50k/yr. Hell, the median individual income is about 35k.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - nonethewiser 4y ago
      No I truly mean it. Sub 50k spending is the norm, not an exception. The higher the average salary here, the more relevant this observation is.
  - dhdhhdd 4y ago
    And yet here i am spending 25k / year on childcare for one kid, not including another (now in public school). Two of them = 40-50k/year. And this is one of the cheapest child cares in the area.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  Do you know of people who are doing 3 mos/year of freelancing and then spending their remaining time doing research or research-adjacent stuff?
- bfeynman 4y ago
  That is the worst napkin math I've seen.
a_bonobo 4y ago
>It feels like the broader trend is for academics to move towards applied research, instead. Funny enough it was the opposite in my niche, a few years ago I could not get any applied research published. The CS reviewers would write things like 'where's the novelty? there are no novel architectures here', the biology reviewers would write things like 'this is a neat tool but we have other solutions that work worse but are established', and the papers would die as preprints. Ah well, glad I'm out of that game.
- melony 4y ago
  Bioinformatician?
  - a_bonobo 4y ago
    Yep :)
- ModernMech 4y ago
  I hear you. One of the worst things is trying to get a PL paper published. Getting past the mathematicians and theoreticians is almost impossible. The only thing they want to look at is proofs and formalisms. Heaven forbid you actually build a thing.
  - kldx 4y ago
    I'm interested in hearing about your experience in PL research. Would you be interested in answering my questions, as someone hoping to enter PL labs?
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      Sure thing! Give ‘em a post here and I’ll answer as best I can.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago
qchris 4y ago
I don't know if it's the sunlight coming in through the window adjacent to their desk or some kind of filter, but for reason their desk set-up looks like a computer rendering of someone's desk set-up. It's ostensibly a 4K image, but after zooming it, it feels like the aesthetic of, well, everything, in the image is closer to something painted than it is an actual photo. I'd recommend taking a look at the details on both the hanging plant leaves and the pot reflections. It's somewhat interesting, because none of the other images in the post seem to have the same effect. Does anyone else see something similar? Is this effect common through post-processing or compression on a certain type of phone or something?
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Take an iPhone and zoom in till it passes the optical zoom limit and uses digital zoom. You'll get that painted effect.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- naet 4y ago
  Sites like this where you can't use default actions like pinch zoom on the mobile view make me sad. Couldn't zoom in on the picture until I switched to the "force desktop view" option.
tinyhouse 4y ago
I don't have time now to read the post but that's not surprising at all. First, Open AI has much stronger people than the average academic so they will work with better people. Second, Open AI pays 3-4 times what a junior professor makes. Finally, academia became so obsessed with industry in recent years that they are too toxic. In deep learning most of the important papers in recent years came from industry. Then academics realized they are behind so they published papers on how dangerous those things are. We all know who is laughing now.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > We all know who is laughing now. The AI sneaking up behind you to take your job?
  - tinyhouse 4y ago
    More like aiding me to be more productive at my job and creating a lot of opportunities for new startups.
goldemerald 4y ago
I am going to write a lament about being a machine learning PhD (near) graduate. Whenever I see these very successful new PhD's, I just have an overwhelming sense of unfairness and sadness. Many of my papers were borderline rejects, delaying me months every time until there's no way for me to catch up with the likes of the author. I am attending a top 25 US school for machine learning (but not better than 25), and the magnitude of difference for the quality of PhD students is staggering. Rarely does anyone at my school graduate with 3 first author papers, let alone 5 (with so many orals!!). It consistently blows my mind how much better these top 10 schools are then the rest at producing papers: the only metric that matters. I've thought about applying to OpenAI as an engineer, which to me would be an amazing opportunity and very prestigious, but I don't want to waste my time: I only have 2 papers done (and God willing a 3rd one for CVPR in 3 weeks). Naturally the skill ratio between me and the author is at least 5:2 (probably worse, since I don't have any oral papers), but this doesn't stop me from feeling that I could contribute to OpenAI as effectively as any new PhD. I know if I were a hiring manager, I'd always go with the more proven candidate, but as the applicant I wish I could prove that my lack of publications should not be held against me. Perhaps this is a common occurrence for any engineer, hitting a ceiling for jobs in this manner, but that doesn't stop me from wishing differently.
- peytoncasper 4y ago
  I won't pretend to know how top tier ML companies hire for research positions, but for literally any other job, the cost of applying is trivial. Throw in some outbound to members on the team for a potential connection and it seems like it's worth the cost for a dream job? Add to the fact that OpenAI is almost certainly going to be expanding wildly given that they have taken on a 10B investment, it seems like as good as a time as any.
  - goldemerald 4y ago
    I've never cold connected to anyone. I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. My first idea is to find members of teams that cited one of my papers, but that makes me sound neurotic about papers, doesn't it. I've had the application page for OpenAI's position open for a couple weeks now, I'll give it a serious try tomorrow, and see if there's any team member that at least 2 degrees of separation from me.
ModernMech 4y ago
> Single-tasking on important problems I think the author is right here. Being a professor is more like being a startup founder than being an employee. > Prestige and money I don’t think the author touches on some of the most important differences in this section. First, most academic faculty jobs are 9 months. This leaves a lot of time for other endeavors. Professors can make bank doing independent consulting work on the side, which is something frowned upon typically for employees. The other thing is, there’s a lot of agency as a professor. Your day-to-day are managed by you. If you want to cancel a class, that’s your prerogative. What you teach in the classroom is yours as well, and the content you create (lecture slides, teaching materials, assignments, exams) is owned by you, not the school. Admin sets your teaching schedule but otherwise your days are yours to manage. I work 3 days a week at home. One week I went to a conference in Greece and taught from the hotel. > Job security Its true that it’s harder to switch jobs than a tech worker in SF. But at the same time, that every city has an academic sector means you aren’t locked into living in a tech hub. Also, while most academic roles are hard to come by, CS positions are routinely open; many departments have been hiring continuously for years. > Freedom I think academia still comes ahead here. Beyond freedom, even more important is control. The administration can’t yank you off a project. If you change institutions, you can take your project and funding with you. That kind of control can’t be found in corporations. More worryingly, many tech companies include clauses in their contracts which try to claim intellectual ownership over all ideas generated by their employees, even in their spare time. I don’t know if OpenAI does, but that kind of contract language is toxic to me. In all, I don’t think the “industry employee”/“academic professor” dichotomy is valid. As I mentioned, the for-profit equivalent of a research lab would be a tech startup. If you don’t think you’d be happy as a startup founder, you won’t be happy as a PI of a research lab. The main allure of going the academic route is that it’s the proven way to work on an idea long term without having to worry about pesky things like profitability and product market fit. The better comparison is academic research scientist, which is more like a staff role. There, you don’t have the breadth of scope a professor does, but you still get to work on a cool project. You don’t have full control over it, but you also are insulated more from it going sideways.
psychomugs 4y ago
> The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research. It’s a shame that this is lost on academic library weenies roleplaying as engineers. A prominent figure in my research area diagnosed the problems of incentivizing “minimal-publishable units” and that if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.
- 314 4y ago
  So much hurt. Point on the doll to where the academic touched you.
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    I know a large section of the internet considers it edgy and cool to say things like this but you really should reflect inwardly on this comment and consider that what you're actually doing here is making a joke about child sexual abuse. People who have survived this horrendous crime may not see the funny side.
    - 314 4y ago
      Fair point, I had not really considered it that way. You are correct.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't post flamebait or personal attacks, or otherwise break the site guidelines. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - psychomugs 4y ago
    I'd overlook the reductive offensiveness of your comment if it wasn't an actual issue in my program. It was.
larsnystrom 4y ago
Is it just me or does he kind of write in the same style as ChatGPT? It’s something about the length and structure of the sentences, but I can’t put my finger on it.
- langsoul-com 4y ago
  Or does chatgpt write like him? Was probs trained on that data :)
classified 4y ago
Makes sense. If you're going to work for a corporate entity you might as well do it directly and get paid in kind etc. Working in academia is for masochists.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Based on their punchline, seems like there should be more AI research in Amsterdam, then!
chriskanan 4y ago
The primary con of academia is almost certainly having to live far from family. However, if you value autonomy, helping others, deciding on the research you want to do, and mostly being your own boss, then it is a very rewarding career. I'm much happier in academia than I was in industry.
- apavlo 4y ago
  > The primary con of academia is almost certainly having to live far from family. It depends on your family.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
  For me this was one of the biggest pluses.
mnky9800n 4y ago
To start with, I never thought I would be so pro-industry. It is very surprising to me, I always saw my pathway as staying in academia. However, that has changed. I work in industry and can echo this. Industry is HAPPENING for research. I am TRUSTED to do research in my company and drive research directions. My time as a research scientist is RESPECTED and I am not asked to do things that would WASTE my time. When I am interacting with my colleagues everyone is INTERESTED in the topic and not their EGOS. It is incredibly rewarding to show up at work and everyone is interested and engaged. Projects are funded either through customers or internally but we all feel like a team. In addition to this industry work, I have a grant through a university that hasn't started yet (!) and I have spent approximately 4 weeks of full-time work doing paperwork related to the grant. This doesn't include any of the effort to write the grant. This full-time work includes: sitting in meetings with the university budget people not understanding their own spreadsheets, writing prestigious letters for prestigious people to sign welcoming me to their own prestigious institutions, defining the specific dates I will take a month long travel to visit a colleague 3 years from now, a back and forth email exchange that took all day to identify the correct date format to be used in a web form (it was unclear the date format was the issue until the end), vainly explaining to university administration that project A and project B are not the same project nor funded the same way despite that I work on both. Also I live in a country that decided to blow up their funding agency because a new party took over the government and that postponed my grant by 1.5 years. Like the author, I loved being a PhD student. I loved doing a postdoc. I love being a scientist. I love the idea of sitting around and thinking about things and building models to test out ideas and creating new knowledge. But working in academia is a no-go because of the amount of nonsense you put up with. This is compounded when you are actively interacting with university administrators who have permanent jobs (funded by the overhead from your grants) while you do not. And likely they have higher salaries then you and your phd students and postdocs. Meanwhile there is little to any support in most places for workers (thankfully, I have a union in the country I work in). I strongly recommend anyone pursuing a phd or postdoc to do whatever they want, but don't buy into the egoist bullshit of academia. Industry is where its at. Sure it has it's problems, not every industry job is like mine. But it is better. And it's not about the pay (even though that is nice). It's about how much I love to show up to work every day compared to the bullshit of academia. Note: I don't know why i was capitalizing words, I suppose I just feel strongly about things.

144 points by bilsbie 4y ago

This and part 1 are interesting reads. > The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research. I think this is the key point. I've heard similar from friends in industry and academic positions.

goethes_kind 4y ago
The hardware resources are there. I for example have access to clusters with hundreds of A100. The engineering resources are not though. The work has to either be done by the Phds themselves or by student workers. Phds don't have enough time and student workers have very little time and no expertise. There are some limited SWE positions in support roles, but as you can expect the pay is not competitive. For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap.
- secabeen 4y ago
  We are starting to build up the field of research facilitation, but it's hard to bring together permanent funding for things like this; quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years, and most universities don't have the culture to put the necessary central funding forward at the scale required. > For some reason even in academic departments where we can build billion euro clusters the people are still paid utter crap. Billion euro clusters are one-time money; people expect benefits and durable employment.
  - indigochill 4y ago
    Haven't national research labs solved this problem? Nobody I talked to at APL seemed to have any concern about shortage of R&D opportunities and although it wasn't Silicon Valley money (which is not sustainable long-term anyway), I don't recall anyone complaining about the salary either.
    - fragmede 4y ago
      If we consider that Silicon Valley started in the 1970s, I'm not sure how much more long term it needs to show to be considered sustainable.
      - krageon 4y ago
        I'm assuming they meant sustainable for a single person. The percentage of people holding such a salary long-term could be very low. I don't know whether or not it is, but that is how I read the comment.
    - nl 4y ago
      There was a thread on this on HN last month: "Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?"[1] Most comments note how the pay is less than FAANG; eg the top voted comments: "Pay is pretty good by almost any standards except FAANG." And elsewhere: "The pay at a DOE lab is less than FAANG (PhD student interns might be around $80k/yr and starting staff scientists maybe $130k/yr), but the tradeoff for some people would be the research-flavor of the work, and the flexibility." etc etc [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414527
    - secabeen 4y ago
      The national research labs are great, but there are only 17 of those, and they don't employ that many people when compared to the software industry. Good gigs if you can get them, certainly.
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    > quality engineers don't want to be on funding that may vanish in 4-5 years I may not be a quality engineer, but I'd be interested. That's a long enough time frame for me. But by what I hear from German academia the pay is bad, the environment is "meh" and the contracts have to be renewed in relatively short periods (yearly?). That makes an otherwise interesting field a hell of a lot harder to choose.
- sseagull 4y ago
  I am really feeling this now. We are an academic group (sort of) that is looking to stand up a server or so for some public-facing apps and databases, but it's like no one has ever heard of such a thing. They keep giving me servers that are behind a firewall and only accessible on-campus. We could maybe do AWS or Azure, but that is really expensive and not really covered by our (government) funding. Plus, any time you want to do something like that (particularly with a company the university doesn't have an existing contract with), you have to get several layers of bureaucracy (including lawyers sometimes) involved. We are a state school, so you can guess how fast that moves. In general, it's easier to ask for a $500k instrument, or take $10k trips to conferences, than get $10/month subscription for some web hosting company. Academia can be really behind on this front. (For me, academia is generally ok and fun in my current position, but this part is getting ridiculous)
  - g42gregory 4y ago
    Why not to buy $500k NVIDIA GPU server?
    - sseagull 4y ago
      We’re trying that :) (minus the GPU. Think more like a database/web server). Although to a lot of reviewers a server is a server. “You have a multi-million dollar compute cluster available, what do you need another server for?”
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      This does not address GP's original concern: <<public-facing apps and databases>>
      - xwdv 4y ago
        Buy the $500k server and get a VPN.
  - ftufek 4y ago
    Have you looked into cloudflare tunnels/ngrok? You can expose any service to internet without dealing with ip addresses, firewalls or opening ports, etc. And tailscale can also give you a private access to any resources even if it's behind firewalls and all that (say you want to access the gpu cluster from your laptop at home). And they can all run in user space without elevated privileges.
- Nimitz14 4y ago
  99% of Unis do not have Hardware like that lol
  - gumby 4y ago
    The R1 tier do; that’s kind of the point. But most aren’t really schools in the normal sense. E.g. MIT is basically a huge research lab with a small undergraduate school bolted on
- discardable_dan 4y ago
  You have access to a hundred A100s, at a price point of ~8500 each, for $850k. If only you could have half, and spend the other half on labor.
- oikawa_tooru_ 4y ago
  Damn. What's the university you work at?
- slowmotiony 4y ago
  A friend of mine is part of the jury that decides on how to distribute millions of euros in EU research grants. There are 6 professors in the jury and the their compensation is exactly 100 euro per decision. You could essentially just make up a bullshit "project", bribe 3 of them with a few thousand bucks and secure yourself a million euro research grant.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Why would professors at the top of their field they sell their integrity for a few thousand dollars?
jvvw 4y ago
I've worked as a developer/engineer both in private sector and in a research department at a university (but not AI/ML). There are a couple of problems with working in an academic context. First, as you say the incentive structure is wrong: projects are led by researchers and the incentives for researchers are around publishing not around creating good software. There's virtually no credit for making software that is well-written, robust, has a great user interface etc. Secondly, the funding structure for projects tends to be grant-based. It's extremely hard to get funding for general ongoing development. I saw lots of projects get initial funding for a couple of years, the funding stopped and then the project had no money even for the most basic support or server costs etc. Sometimes you could grant funding for new features and could funnel a bit of that into support but it did require a constant regular stream of grant applications, as often of course you don't get them. My salary was certainly largely funded by grants - I had a permanent job and there was some allowance for gaps between funding to cover that and because of the type of work I was doing I could do some internal work too in those gaps. It's hard to manage funding that comes with short-term grants. You just can't recruit good people to short-term contracts that quickly before they are supposed to start, especially for what universities can pay (in the UK there are set pay scales, so if you don't manage anybody you basically can't be paid more than a certain amount, plus there are strict processes about recruiting, for good reasons, so it's hard to do quickly).

nmca 4y ago

A CEO I worked with once said: "academia is like a burlap sack full of cats with one sardine in it" This seems accurate.

gdsimoes 4y ago
And the sardine is poisoned.
deleted 4y ago
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antegamisou 4y ago

Just going by the absurd process of obtaining tenure in a US university, selecting the industry route is a no-brainer considering some restriction in academic freedom (not necessarily always the case though).

nonethewiser 4y ago
Only an idiot would stay in academia
- speedgoose 4y ago
  Remember to work hard to make value for your shareholders.
  - raverbashing 4y ago
    Cool, know what's the equivalent of that in academia? Remember to work hard to please your advisor. But don't forget you get barely no raises. No RSUs/Stock Options. Benefits? What are those? Oh cool, now you have a PhD. Tenure? Best we can do is a 2yr contract...
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      You work on topics you enjoy to improve the society and extend the knowledge of our civilisation ? Your advisor is there to help you, you don't work for them as a slave. Not all people want a carrot that is designed to make them work hard, RSUs/Stock options ? No thanks I will take money and continue having fun without thinking much about accountants stuff such as the company profits. But I agree, some places do not offer great salaries and permanent contracts and it's a big issue.
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        I speak from experience, and I'm glad if you don't have similar experiences Working on things that improve society and discovery doesn't have to be done in academic contexts, quite the contrary. A lot of times with more freedom and less BS

29athrowaway 4y ago

[flagged]

atdrummond 4y ago
None of the people elected at the local level have any interest in making the city better for everyone. They have their coalition that is large enough to ensure their continued re-election and their terms are served by parceling out sufficient benefits to said coalition partners to guarantee their ongoing support. They now act bewildered that, like Portland, their downtown is dead and shows no sign of improvement in the near term. As the tax base continues to collapse and more pressure is put on existing homeowners/residents, it’ll be interesting to see how the resulting cost of living crisis impacts these coalitions. I suspect things get far, far worse before they get any better.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  If learned helplessness was a city, it would be San Francisco. Public defecation, car break-ins, littering, homelessness, people shooting drugs, needles everywhere, junkies talking gibberish and yelling to hallucinations, etc. What's the point of paying a fortune to live like that?
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - searealist 4y ago
      Just 5 days ago from you: > And good luck not having your bikes get regularly stolen in places like SF or NYC. You better ride the most revolting beater you can find, and even then. If you don't want your bike stolen, then please leave SF.
  - VectorLock 4y ago
    And yet still has some of the highest property values in the country. Curious.

fatneckbeard 4y ago

"my partner and I grew up in the Bay Area, and have parents who live nearby. " yeup. nobody talks about this but its one of the most important things you will ever have to decide in life.

sva_ 4y ago
Decisions such as what kind of parents birth you?
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  If you want kids, having parents nearby can be the difference between sanity and insanity.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Can corroborate. And once you have kids in school and a career in one location, it's not going to be trivial to move around. Moved away from family, for work in my 20s, ended up with wife and family. But now even with remote work and the ability for me to work anywhere I want, and a kid with health issues and family could help... moving back to where my parents are (now in their late 70s) isn't a simple option. Means pulling kids from school and friends, wife from my in-laws, it's a whole thing. Think carefully how you start your career in your 20s.
    - blobbers 4y ago
      Yes. Silicon Valley is a trap. You can’t afford to have parents nearby unless they already are (as these folks have) Everything related to families is a cash grab and a SFH in Palo Alto, Peninsula or Cupertino means throwing any hope of early financial freedom. A FAANG job will pay more but for how you can live almost anywhere else in the country, a remote job at 2/3 the salary is much much better.
  - nmfisher 4y ago
    My wife and I live in an entirely different country from both our parents. Our first was born early last year, and my mother-in-law only just got a chance to come and help out for a few weeks. Having family around to help take care of the kids makes a HUGE difference (and not just financially), particularly with two working parents. It's obviously doable without it, but if you have the option, I would strongly advise at least considering moving somewhere close to family who can help out.

dustingetz 4y ago

in the USA it’s been possible to get COL down to sub $50k for a comfortable life and live on 3 mos a year of freelancing mainstream stack stuff, you can focus on long term research indefinitely without distractions. Main downside is can’t live in SF/NY so your project better work out. if you weren’t gonna chase money anyway then what difference does it make?

nonethewiser 4y ago
Possible? Most Americans spend significantly less than 50k/yr. Hell, the median individual income is about 35k.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - nonethewiser 4y ago
    No I truly mean it. Sub 50k spending is the norm, not an exception. The higher the average salary here, the more relevant this observation is.
- dhdhhdd 4y ago
  And yet here i am spending 25k / year on childcare for one kid, not including another (now in public school). Two of them = 40-50k/year. And this is one of the cheapest child cares in the area.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
Do you know of people who are doing 3 mos/year of freelancing and then spending their remaining time doing research or research-adjacent stuff?
bfeynman 4y ago
That is the worst napkin math I've seen.

a_bonobo 4y ago

>It feels like the broader trend is for academics to move towards applied research, instead. Funny enough it was the opposite in my niche, a few years ago I could not get any applied research published. The CS reviewers would write things like 'where's the novelty? there are no novel architectures here', the biology reviewers would write things like 'this is a neat tool but we have other solutions that work worse but are established', and the papers would die as preprints. Ah well, glad I'm out of that game.

melony 4y ago
Bioinformatician?
- a_bonobo 4y ago
  Yep :)
ModernMech 4y ago
I hear you. One of the worst things is trying to get a PL paper published. Getting past the mathematicians and theoreticians is almost impossible. The only thing they want to look at is proofs and formalisms. Heaven forbid you actually build a thing.
- kldx 4y ago
  I'm interested in hearing about your experience in PL research. Would you be interested in answering my questions, as someone hoping to enter PL labs?
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    Sure thing! Give ‘em a post here and I’ll answer as best I can.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
4y ago

qchris 4y ago

I don't know if it's the sunlight coming in through the window adjacent to their desk or some kind of filter, but for reason their desk set-up looks like a computer rendering of someone's desk set-up. It's ostensibly a 4K image, but after zooming it, it feels like the aesthetic of, well, everything, in the image is closer to something painted than it is an actual photo. I'd recommend taking a look at the details on both the hanging plant leaves and the pot reflections. It's somewhat interesting, because none of the other images in the post seem to have the same effect. Does anyone else see something similar? Is this effect common through post-processing or compression on a certain type of phone or something?

renewiltord 4y ago
Take an iPhone and zoom in till it passes the optical zoom limit and uses digital zoom. You'll get that painted effect.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
naet 4y ago
Sites like this where you can't use default actions like pinch zoom on the mobile view make me sad. Couldn't zoom in on the picture until I switched to the "force desktop view" option.

tinyhouse 4y ago

I don't have time now to read the post but that's not surprising at all. First, Open AI has much stronger people than the average academic so they will work with better people. Second, Open AI pays 3-4 times what a junior professor makes. Finally, academia became so obsessed with industry in recent years that they are too toxic. In deep learning most of the important papers in recent years came from industry. Then academics realized they are behind so they published papers on how dangerous those things are. We all know who is laughing now.

UncleEntity 4y ago
> We all know who is laughing now. The AI sneaking up behind you to take your job?
- tinyhouse 4y ago
  More like aiding me to be more productive at my job and creating a lot of opportunities for new startups.

goldemerald 4y ago

I am going to write a lament about being a machine learning PhD (near) graduate. Whenever I see these very successful new PhD's, I just have an overwhelming sense of unfairness and sadness. Many of my papers were borderline rejects, delaying me months every time until there's no way for me to catch up with the likes of the author. I am attending a top 25 US school for machine learning (but not better than 25), and the magnitude of difference for the quality of PhD students is staggering. Rarely does anyone at my school graduate with 3 first author papers, let alone 5 (with so many orals!!). It consistently blows my mind how much better these top 10 schools are then the rest at producing papers: the only metric that matters. I've thought about applying to OpenAI as an engineer, which to me would be an amazing opportunity and very prestigious, but I don't want to waste my time: I only have 2 papers done (and God willing a 3rd one for CVPR in 3 weeks). Naturally the skill ratio between me and the author is at least 5:2 (probably worse, since I don't have any oral papers), but this doesn't stop me from feeling that I could contribute to OpenAI as effectively as any new PhD. I know if I were a hiring manager, I'd always go with the more proven candidate, but as the applicant I wish I could prove that my lack of publications should not be held against me. Perhaps this is a common occurrence for any engineer, hitting a ceiling for jobs in this manner, but that doesn't stop me from wishing differently.

peytoncasper 4y ago
I won't pretend to know how top tier ML companies hire for research positions, but for literally any other job, the cost of applying is trivial. Throw in some outbound to members on the team for a potential connection and it seems like it's worth the cost for a dream job? Add to the fact that OpenAI is almost certainly going to be expanding wildly given that they have taken on a 10B investment, it seems like as good as a time as any.
- goldemerald 4y ago
  I've never cold connected to anyone. I wouldn't know how to go about doing it. My first idea is to find members of teams that cited one of my papers, but that makes me sound neurotic about papers, doesn't it. I've had the application page for OpenAI's position open for a couple weeks now, I'll give it a serious try tomorrow, and see if there's any team member that at least 2 degrees of separation from me.

ModernMech 4y ago

> Single-tasking on important problems I think the author is right here. Being a professor is more like being a startup founder than being an employee. > Prestige and money I don’t think the author touches on some of the most important differences in this section. First, most academic faculty jobs are 9 months. This leaves a lot of time for other endeavors. Professors can make bank doing independent consulting work on the side, which is something frowned upon typically for employees. The other thing is, there’s a lot of agency as a professor. Your day-to-day are managed by you. If you want to cancel a class, that’s your prerogative. What you teach in the classroom is yours as well, and the content you create (lecture slides, teaching materials, assignments, exams) is owned by you, not the school. Admin sets your teaching schedule but otherwise your days are yours to manage. I work 3 days a week at home. One week I went to a conference in Greece and taught from the hotel. > Job security Its true that it’s harder to switch jobs than a tech worker in SF. But at the same time, that every city has an academic sector means you aren’t locked into living in a tech hub. Also, while most academic roles are hard to come by, CS positions are routinely open; many departments have been hiring continuously for years. > Freedom I think academia still comes ahead here. Beyond freedom, even more important is control. The administration can’t yank you off a project. If you change institutions, you can take your project and funding with you. That kind of control can’t be found in corporations. More worryingly, many tech companies include clauses in their contracts which try to claim intellectual ownership over all ideas generated by their employees, even in their spare time. I don’t know if OpenAI does, but that kind of contract language is toxic to me. In all, I don’t think the “industry employee”/“academic professor” dichotomy is valid. As I mentioned, the for-profit equivalent of a research lab would be a tech startup. If you don’t think you’d be happy as a startup founder, you won’t be happy as a PI of a research lab. The main allure of going the academic route is that it’s the proven way to work on an idea long term without having to worry about pesky things like profitability and product market fit. The better comparison is academic research scientist, which is more like a staff role. There, you don’t have the breadth of scope a professor does, but you still get to work on a cool project. You don’t have full control over it, but you also are insulated more from it going sideways.

psychomugs 4y ago

> The reality is that building systems is really hard. It requires a lot of resources, and a lot of engineering. I think the incentive structures in academia aren't very suited for this kind of costly, risky systems-building research. It’s a shame that this is lost on academic library weenies roleplaying as engineers. A prominent figure in my research area diagnosed the problems of incentivizing “minimal-publishable units” and that if these researchers were working on home computing, they would’ve just run circles around microproblems like whether the more verbose “remove_directory” is more usable than “rmdir,” and no one would’ve bothered with the unpublishable plumbing of building mice and browsers and interfaces.

314 4y ago
So much hurt. Point on the doll to where the academic touched you.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  I know a large section of the internet considers it edgy and cool to say things like this but you really should reflect inwardly on this comment and consider that what you're actually doing here is making a joke about child sexual abuse. People who have survived this horrendous crime may not see the funny side.
  - 314 4y ago
    Fair point, I had not really considered it that way. You are correct.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't post flamebait or personal attacks, or otherwise break the site guidelines. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- psychomugs 4y ago
  I'd overlook the reductive offensiveness of your comment if it wasn't an actual issue in my program. It was.

larsnystrom 4y ago

Is it just me or does he kind of write in the same style as ChatGPT? It’s something about the length and structure of the sentences, but I can’t put my finger on it.

langsoul-com 4y ago
Or does chatgpt write like him? Was probs trained on that data :)

classified 4y ago

Makes sense. If you're going to work for a corporate entity you might as well do it directly and get paid in kind etc. Working in academia is for masochists.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Based on their punchline, seems like there should be more AI research in Amsterdam, then!

chriskanan 4y ago

The primary con of academia is almost certainly having to live far from family. However, if you value autonomy, helping others, deciding on the research you want to do, and mostly being your own boss, then it is a very rewarding career. I'm much happier in academia than I was in industry.

apavlo 4y ago
> The primary con of academia is almost certainly having to live far from family. It depends on your family.
bigbacaloa 4y ago
For me this was one of the biggest pluses.

mnky9800n 4y ago

To start with, I never thought I would be so pro-industry. It is very surprising to me, I always saw my pathway as staying in academia. However, that has changed. I work in industry and can echo this. Industry is HAPPENING for research. I am TRUSTED to do research in my company and drive research directions. My time as a research scientist is RESPECTED and I am not asked to do things that would WASTE my time. When I am interacting with my colleagues everyone is INTERESTED in the topic and not their EGOS. It is incredibly rewarding to show up at work and everyone is interested and engaged. Projects are funded either through customers or internally but we all feel like a team. In addition to this industry work, I have a grant through a university that hasn't started yet (!) and I have spent approximately 4 weeks of full-time work doing paperwork related to the grant. This doesn't include any of the effort to write the grant. This full-time work includes: sitting in meetings with the university budget people not understanding their own spreadsheets, writing prestigious letters for prestigious people to sign welcoming me to their own prestigious institutions, defining the specific dates I will take a month long travel to visit a colleague 3 years from now, a back and forth email exchange that took all day to identify the correct date format to be used in a web form (it was unclear the date format was the issue until the end), vainly explaining to university administration that project A and project B are not the same project nor funded the same way despite that I work on both. Also I live in a country that decided to blow up their funding agency because a new party took over the government and that postponed my grant by 1.5 years. Like the author, I loved being a PhD student. I loved doing a postdoc. I love being a scientist. I love the idea of sitting around and thinking about things and building models to test out ideas and creating new knowledge. But working in academia is a no-go because of the amount of nonsense you put up with. This is compounded when you are actively interacting with university administrators who have permanent jobs (funded by the overhead from your grants) while you do not. And likely they have higher salaries then you and your phd students and postdocs. Meanwhile there is little to any support in most places for workers (thankfully, I have a union in the country I work in). I strongly recommend anyone pursuing a phd or postdoc to do whatever they want, but don't buy into the egoist bullshit of academia. Industry is where its at. Sure it has it's problems, not every industry job is like mine. But it is better. And it's not about the pay (even though that is nice). It's about how much I love to show up to work every day compared to the bullshit of academia. Note: I don't know why i was capitalizing words, I suppose I just feel strongly about things.