
Facebook Adds A.I. Labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, Pressuring Local Universities - rbanffy
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/technology/facebook-artificial-intelligence-researchers.html
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kss238
Previous discussion

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17003244](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17003244)

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rbanffy
Mobile website strikes again :-(

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poster123
University that want to retain computer science professors, especially those
working in hot fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning,
will have to pay them well. The main problem may be political -- can they pay
professors in different departments very different amounts?

One reason it is difficult to attact high school teachers who can teach
computer programming well is that teachers' union contracts say that you have
to pay gym teachers and CS teachers the same amount.

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_delirium
> 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-
int...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-
salaries-openai.html)

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ghaff
Professors taking sabbaticals to work at private companies seems to be a
common pattern as well—and probably a generally good one for everyone
involved.

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oytis
This wave of hate starts looking funny already. Facebook pays researchers
decent salaries? Let's say it "pressures local universities".

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danmaz74
OTOH, having many of our most brilliant minds all working on putting more ads
in front of more eyes to get more clicks isn't such a great thing.

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PunchTornado
hmm, they will develop more intelligent systems which will have applications
in all domains.

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0xcde4c3db
Scenario: a well-placed middle manager has a mid-life crisis and authorizes a
skunkworks project to have an AI surreptitiously replace them while they
travel the world. When other managers discover this, they demand their own AI
surrogates rather than reporting the scheme to the C-suite. When this is
eventually exposed, FB collapses in a firestorm of controversy, only for its
investors to quietly start a bunch of new companies intentionally based on AI
management. Eventually _Accelerando_ , I guess.

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Al-Khwarizmi
To be brutally honest, I must confess that as a European in a peripheral
university, also working in an AI subfield, I feel a bit of glee about this.

Those elite American universities have been sucking talent away from all over
the world, and working with an amount of resources that provide them with a
considerable advantage.

Now they receive some taste of their own medicine.

Note: I'm aware that there is nothing bad in what those universities have done
(probably every university would do the same if they could or knew how) and I
shouldn't feel like that! But I'm just human, and unfortunately far from being
a perfect human... and being beaten to results by people that have 3x as many
PhD students and 10x as much GPU power ends up creating bitter feelings.

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projectramo
This is just going to make it more competitive for everyone. Even more
European professors will be hired away for even more money.

Note: I am not saying it’s better or worse, just (much) more competitive.

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DSingularity
In my opinion, shame on any professor who joins an organization which has
shown such disregard for their users without at least demanding reform.

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arkades
I agree!

I just can’t tell whether you’re referring to universities or to tech.

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PunchTornado
He is clearly referring to the guys charging 50k / year to 19 years old.

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skj
*19s year old

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soVeryTired
Surely lecturers will just keep one foot in each world? Back before '08 when
finance gurus were killing it, many of them kept ties with academia. It's a
useful insurance policy, and it's great to be able to fall back to teaching or
research once you've had enough of industry.

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krageon
I love that even the new york times is apparently incapable of introducing a
cookiebar that conforms to the actual law they're trying to conform to. It's
not especially complicated to not give me cookies unless I say I'm OK with
receiving them, instead they've gone with the "implied consent" option (again)
that is pretty explicitly not consent anymore.

