Million-dollar babies — from economist.com by
As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their stars
Excerpt:
THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some $8.5 billion on deals, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.
In the past universities employed the world’s best AI experts. Now tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning (where computers learn from data themselves) for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries similar to those fetched by professional athletes.
Experts in machine learning are most in demand. Big tech firms use it in many activities, from basic tasks such as spam-filtering and better targeting of online advertisements, to futuristic endeavours such as self-driving cars or scanning images to identify disease.
Also from The Economist, see:
Excerpt:
AI is already starting to generate big financial gains for companies, which helps explain firms’ growing investment in developing AI capabilities. Machine-learning, in which computers become smarter by processing large data-sets, currently has many profitable consumer-facing applications, including image recognition in photographs, spam filtering and those that help to better target advertisements to web surfers. Many of tech firms’ most ambitious projects, including building self-driving cars and designing virtual personal assistants that can understand and execute complex tasks, also rely on artificial intelligence, especially machine-learning and robotics. This has prompted tech firms to try to hire up as much of the top talent as they can from universities, where the best AI experts research and teach. Some worry about the potential of a brain drain from academia into the private sector.
The biggest concern, however, is that one firm corners the majority of the talent in artificial intelligence, creating an intellectual monopoly of sorts.