> “He was offered such a huge amount of money that he simply stopped everything and left,” said Maja Pantic, professor of affective and behavioural computing at Imperial. “It’s five times the salary I can offer. It’s unbelievable. We cannot compete.”
Glassdoor suggests that a salary for a machine learning or natural language processing engineer at Apple averages about $125k. It's not like "6 figures" means $999,999. ...And this was five times the salary that the professor could offer, implying the grad student was valued at $25,000 a year. Here are Imperial's salary guidelines [1]. Given that the student was one year prior to their PhD, it appears they were capped at £35,850, which is closer to $47k, so maybe Apple paid $250k, but $47k is still not as much as the person is obviously worth.
And then she advocates pay caps.
The reason that private industry is willing to pay these people so much is not some nefarious desire to monopolize the skills and outputs. It's because their work is able to generate value in excess of that salary.
Universities need to offer professors and grad students a job with a value - salaries, benefits, and investment in their future - that makes it worthwhile for them to work there. They've been able to mistreat altruistically minded students who don't know what they're worth, and allow shortfalls in their education so they lack the skills to function effectively in the workplace, but while that may work in some sectors AI scientists are currently so valuable that it's not using. Let's fix the universities, not place blame on the companies who are hiring the scientists out of those universities.
[1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/administrat...