Perhaps not all of them are in the Bay Area/London? 150k per year can buy you three top professors from Eastern European Universities to work for you full time, and be happy about it. Sure, other jobs pay more, but when unconstrained from living in an expensive city, these grants actually go quite far. (We’re toying with ideas of opening research hubs outside of most expensive hubs in the world, exactly for that reason)
Fwiw I’m pretty confident that if a top professor wanted funding at 50k/year to do AI Safety stuff they would get immediately funded, and that the bottleneck is that people in this reference class aren’t applying to do this.
There’s also relevant mentorship/management bottlenecks in this, so funding them to do their own research is generally a lot less overall costly than if it also required oversight.
It can indeed go far in lower cost of living areas- if the average salary is brought down by a bunch of willing and highly effective cheap talent, that would be perfectly fine and good. (And I endorse hubs in cheaper areas! I might have moved to SF, if not for it being… SF.)
I do still worry about practical competitiveness in this case, though. For reference, housing in the DFW area is 3-5x cheaper than the bay area, so 150k/year buys you quite a bit of luxury… but you can find work for even more than that. A lot more, depending on specialty and experience. If we model researchers as simple economic agents, offers need to compete with other offers, not just the cost of living.
Those top professors might have reasons to not take higher paying (in terms of real pay vs. cost of living) industry jobs. Maybe they don’t want to move internationally, maybe they’ve got family, maybe they like the autonomy their current position has, maybe they believe in the cause sufficiently that they view the pay cut as a form of charity, and so on. In terms of funding strategy, though, I wouldn’t want to rely on people accepting dramatically lower rates than they can demand.
I agree, but AIS jobs are usually fairly remote-friendly (unlike many corporate jobs) and the culture is better than in most universities that I’ve worked with, so it has many non-wage perks. Question is, can people in cheap cost-of-living places find such high paid work? In Eastern Europe, usually no—there are other people willing/able to work for less so all wages are low, cost of living correlates with wages in that sense too. So giving generous salaries to experts that are in/are willing to relocate to lower cost of living places is cost-effective, insofar as they are currently an underutilized group. I know in EE there are people who would make for good researchers, but are unaware of the problems, salary landscape and such, which is something we’re trying to fix (and global awareness of AI is helping a lot).
Perhaps not all of them are in the Bay Area/London? 150k per year can buy you three top professors from Eastern European Universities to work for you full time, and be happy about it. Sure, other jobs pay more, but when unconstrained from living in an expensive city, these grants actually go quite far. (We’re toying with ideas of opening research hubs outside of most expensive hubs in the world, exactly for that reason)
Fwiw I’m pretty confident that if a top professor wanted funding at 50k/year to do AI Safety stuff they would get immediately funded, and that the bottleneck is that people in this reference class aren’t applying to do this.
There’s also relevant mentorship/management bottlenecks in this, so funding them to do their own research is generally a lot less overall costly than if it also required oversight.
(written quickly, sorry if unclear)
It can indeed go far in lower cost of living areas- if the average salary is brought down by a bunch of willing and highly effective cheap talent, that would be perfectly fine and good. (And I endorse hubs in cheaper areas! I might have moved to SF, if not for it being… SF.)
I do still worry about practical competitiveness in this case, though. For reference, housing in the DFW area is 3-5x cheaper than the bay area, so 150k/year buys you quite a bit of luxury… but you can find work for even more than that. A lot more, depending on specialty and experience. If we model researchers as simple economic agents, offers need to compete with other offers, not just the cost of living.
Those top professors might have reasons to not take higher paying (in terms of real pay vs. cost of living) industry jobs. Maybe they don’t want to move internationally, maybe they’ve got family, maybe they like the autonomy their current position has, maybe they believe in the cause sufficiently that they view the pay cut as a form of charity, and so on. In terms of funding strategy, though, I wouldn’t want to rely on people accepting dramatically lower rates than they can demand.
I agree, but AIS jobs are usually fairly remote-friendly (unlike many corporate jobs) and the culture is better than in most universities that I’ve worked with, so it has many non-wage perks. Question is, can people in cheap cost-of-living places find such high paid work? In Eastern Europe, usually no—there are other people willing/able to work for less so all wages are low, cost of living correlates with wages in that sense too. So giving generous salaries to experts that are in/are willing to relocate to lower cost of living places is cost-effective, insofar as they are currently an underutilized group. I know in EE there are people who would make for good researchers, but are unaware of the problems, salary landscape and such, which is something we’re trying to fix (and global awareness of AI is helping a lot).