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Comment by candiodari | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The problem with this field is that if you want to see what you'd have to do to be a star researcher in AI. You'd have to be top-10 amongst 20.000 or so machine learning PhDs. This is not a reasonable aspiration. Plus I would argue that although Ilya Sutskever did a ridiculous amount of effort and then got lucky, 2 two others were at best interested academics on the sidelines for most of their careers, then got lucky with a grad student. There's at least 1000 who did similar effort to Ilya (let's say half as much, which is still triple what any reasonable person would find reasonable), way more than the 2 other named examples, yet have no hope at all of ever achieving his level of recognition, including several of the students who really did most of the work the 2 others got recognition for.

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You also have to do a PhD, and make sure you get a good adviser/good department, and get lucky enough for nothing bad to happen to your adviser and department, and be very careful with how you spend your time (if you spend a lot of time on something that doesn't end up being fruitful, that's opportunity cost that other top researchers might have turned into a breakout publication and now you are behind). And you make like $30k/year while in grad school and might experience some pretty bad mental health due to stress.

Of course, the average/above-average case isn't terrible. I think non-famous AI researchers are still getting hired into $400-500k/year at FAANG at "senior" level, it's just that you would be making roughly the same amount of money if you just went directly into software engineering at a FAANG out of undergrad and did above-average at promotions.

To me, that makes it not really make sense to go into AI research (especially now, when it's a hot topic and you have a 3-5 year wait to get your PhD) unless it's something you are genuinely interested in. For purely career reasons, it doesn't seem much better than just going right into software engineering.

The strangest thing is that knowing a lot of PhDs and PhD students (my wife is currently one), very few are motivated by financial rewards. Making money isn't always seen as a yardstick of success by their peers.

That's why I never recommend people to go into PhD programs for career advancement. I have a colleague who works 50% as an NLP PhD student and 50% in my data science team. To really get that PhD done you have to live and breathe for the subject, and only the subject, for however long it takes. He's been on this track for 2 years now and is thinking of quitting, his own words; "I often feel like if I really wanted PhD, I wouldn't be working so hard building models for industry all the time".

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