Researchers in artificial intelligence earn huge sums

The huge salaries and rewards artificial intelligence experts can get are one of Silicon Valley's most important secrets, but if you're looking for high-paying technical jobs, you should focus on that area, depending on where you're looking for, according to a New York Times report. Times, which indicates that researchers in the field of artificial intelligence AI are making a fortune through this area, where salaries reach millions of dollars in some cases.

The report cites a tax deposit by a non-profit research lab called OpenAI, which was led by Elon Masak, chief executive of Tesla for the electric car industry and other well-known technical figures, to open in 2015. The lab paid its chief investigator Ilya Sutskever more than $ 1.9 million in 2016.

The lab also paid another researcher, Ian Goodfellow, an amount of $ 800,000, although he was not hired until March of that year, both of whom were appointed by Google, while Pieter Abbeel was the third big name in the field, The $ 425,000 mechanism, although he did not join until June 2016 after taking leave from his job as professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The figures show that these amounts include all bonuses and bonuses, while the figures from the tax models, which the OpenAI Research Laboratory is required to issue publicly because it is a non-profit organization, provide a new look at what organizations around the world pay for artificial intelligence talents, By the laboratory may be less than these researchers can obtain, depending on being a non-profit organization.

According to the report, the rise in the salaries of researchers in the field of artificial suddenly due to the lack of many people who understand this technology, and there are thousands of companies that try to enter this area and need to experts and researchers, and estimates the independent laboratory Element Artificial Intelligence that there are 22 thousand people around the world They have the skills to do serious artificial intelligence research, twice as much as a year ago.

Technology giants usually compensate employees through stock options, as well as salaries and bonuses. This option is not available to OpenAI because it is a non-profit organization, but in its first year the lab spent about $ 11 million, with more than $ 7 million going To the salaries and other benefits of staff, where the laboratory in 2016 employ 52 people.

Artificial intelligence specialists with little or no experience in this field can earn between $ 300,000 and $ 500,000 a year through salaries and shares, while well-known names can earn up to millions of dollars in compensation.

According to the annual financial statements of a Google lab in Britain, the total cost of 400 employees at the DeepMind Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, currently owned by Google, totals about $ 138 million in 2016, which translates to $ 345,000 per employee, including researchers and other employees.

Some researchers may get higher wages because their names carry weight through the artificial intelligence community and can help recruit other researchers, including researcher Ilya Sutskever, who was part of a research team of three researchers at the University of Toronto, who in turn invented a key vision technology, Researcher Ian Goodfellow devised a technique that allows machines to create fake digital images that can not be distinguished from real ones.

The number of artificial intelligence researchers available is growing, but these numbers are not growing fast enough, as demand for such talent is growing faster than the offer available in the form of new researchers, which means that it will be difficult for companies to keep In the past year, after just 11 months in OpenAI, Ian Goodfellow returned to Google.

Pieter Abbeel left the laboratory to create the emerging Embodied Intelligence robotics company, and registered as a part-time consultant within OpenAI. Another researcher left the laboratory, Andrej Karpathy, to become the head of artificial intelligence at Tesla, which also builds self-driving technology.