
Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce AI Talent - pdog
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-intelligence-experts-salaries.html
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vonnik
One interesting aspect to this is that most companies focused on AI are
chasing the same research talent, which is indeed rare. But sometimes AI
research is not the most important skillset, especially when applying
something like deep learning to the problems that a business faces. There are
many software engineers capable of understanding the math behind deep
learning, and piecing together the parts for ETL, training and inference.

Full disclosure: I was quoted in this article.

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0xbear
An average high schooler is able to understand the math involved in DL, but
not even the leading researchers can explain why certain things work better
than others, let alone predict what will work better.

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Q6T46nT668w6i3m
Well said.

In my experience, model interpretation is an undervalued skill. In most
environments you need models that are both accurate and interpretable.

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pen2l
Can someone please explain to me, AI talent that is sought after is... is the
search for mathematicians who can _create_ ML tools, or merely use ML tools
(like scikit-learn or whatever-have-you, to optimize ad-targeting or things
like that)?

I take it most of the times it's the latter. In which the case the AI talent
in question doesn't need to be the most hardcore programmer, just someone who
knows statistics, can do some basic linear regression and whatnot and knows
one of the more popular ML libraries, like scikit-learn or tensorflow.

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Q6T46nT668w6i3m
In my experience, neither. Most are searching for people with feature
engineering expertise (i.e. people who know what and how to extract learnable
features for a particular problem domain).

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nulldereference
"Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and
people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid
from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock,
according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained
job offers from them."

Wow, half a million dollars in salary, I'm living under a rock.

Sign me up!

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jchonphoenix
It's less than you think in the Bay Area. Above average engineers easily break
300k. Really good ones will break 500K.

After rent and taxes in the Bay area though, if you're in the 300k bucket,
you'll only have 140k left not including higher food / transportation /
private school costs. Definitely a good amount but much less impressive than
the original sounds.

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seattle_spring
Only 140k left over!? How do they eat?

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utopcell
Free food ;-)

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temp20160423
I work at one of the companies mentioned in the article although not doing ML.
From what I can tell, these stories do a disservice since all these people
come into the company wanting to do ML when most work is not nearly so
glamorous.

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hmm_really
Grab it while you can, it won't last, and then there will be a load of people
on market with inflated salary expectations.

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dizzy3gg
I have learned to use Tensorflow Object Detection API, learned how to augment
images and am yet to find an object I cannot detect.

Will this be true of other fields like chatbots? Where all I need to
understand is how to train and inference?

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Q6T46nT668w6i3m
I work on image segmentation and object detection research. In fact, my work
can be found in the classifiers provided by the TensorFlow Object Detection
package. I’ll be blunt, we suck at object detection and we really suck at
object detection where there’re more than a handful of classes (there’s a
reason we use top-k for evaluation) which is most problems. Furthermore, we’re
entirely useless when it comes to problems that requires some interpretable
taxonomy (e.g. make and model of a car). I encourage you to try some harder
problems. :)

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dizzy3gg
Really? I have an image with 180 classes on, so far (slight model config
changes from pets tutorial) I've managed to detect 80% of the classes. Don't
get me wrong images are similar in both sequence of objects and background
(supermarket shelf). I have a budget to bring in a consultant, is this
something you'd be interested in?

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xor1
Is there any way for me to start getting up-to-speed and possibly being
hirable as an AI/Deep Learning expert (with alot of luck) in the next year or
2, without going back for a MS or PHD? Where should I start looking, in terms
of guidance and discussion? I don't have a family yet, so I have lots of free
time outside of work still.

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rahimnathwani
There's a nice list here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12900448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12900448)

There have been some great resources released since that list was written. For
the courses, the exercises/assignments are the most important part.

\- Deeplearning.ai's courses on Coursera (course 4 of 5 coming out next week)

\- Practical Deep Learning for Coders Parts 1 & 2

\- Book: Hands-on machine learning with TF and SKLearn (Aurelion Geron)

If you want a really gentle path, I'd start with 'Data Science from Scratch'
by Joel Grus.

If you want to start at the deep end, buy the Deep Learning Book by Goodfellow
et al. They review the relevant math at the beginning, but it's work to go
through it. Perhaps if you recently got out of school you'll find it easier
than others.

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putroce
What's the salary for a new graduate (Bachelor's) in this field? Do they even
get the opportunity or are these jobs only available for Masters/PH.D.s?

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arcanus
These are research positions, so it's unlikely undergrads are getting in on
that.

