
Google forms Montreal AI research group, gives $3.37M - mundus
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/21/google-forms-montreal-ai-research-group-gives-3-37-million-grant-to-yoshua-bengio-others/
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rawnlq
I thought the going rate for researchers is supposed to be pretty high. For
example for self driving cars it's supposedly 10mil a head:
[http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-
sel...](http://www.recode.net/2016/9/17/12943214/sebastian-thrun-self-driving-
talent-pool). Is that mostly exaggerated?

3.37M sounds like it can barely pay the salary of <10 people for less than a
year.

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tnecniv
That figure isn't quite right.

First, salary varies depending on what you mean by researcher. Someone with an
MS in a hot field is going to make more as a specialist than a PhD student or
postdoc in academia and professor salaries can heavily depend based on rank
and funding. Some people at the top make out quite well, but they are either
1) entrenched in the bureaucracy (e.g. grant writing, publicity, actually
running the university) and removed from actual research or 2) they have a
side job (see Steven LaValle or any business school professor who does
consulting work).

Second, looking at the exact quote from the article ("Uber has just bought a
half-a-year-old company [Otto] with 70 employees for almost $700 million"),
the analysis is off. Yes, $700 million / 70 people = $10 million per person,
but they aren't just paying for people. They are paying for tech, code, IP,
basically whatever the company has. Anyone who had points on the package there
was probably pretty happy considering the company was less than a year old,
but any developer without shares didn't suddenly become a millionaire over
night.

This all said, if you are a specialist in a niche field that's going through a
renaissance (which both robotics and ML are doing right now), you can command
a nice salary.

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devoply
Exploit cheap labour in Canada. Create more jobs. Win-win, I guess.

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eli_gottlieb
Or to exploit American labor who want to GTFO now.

