Today, AI has found its way into many practical applications.
The multi-faceted AI arms race has increased demand for AI talent.
Under such circumstances, those who have deeper pockets have managed to hire AI scientists for their projects.
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This paved the way for many new commercial uses of AI.
The possibilities offered by deep learning drew interest from large tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.
The renewed interest in neural networks triggered the race to poach AI scientists from academic institutes.
And thus began the AI brain drain.
ANew York Timesstoryfrom 2018 claimed that OpenAI paid some of its scientists more than $1 million per year.
Have AI professors and academicians been able to resist the temptation of leaving academia for commercial entities?
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Nvidia have each hired several AI professors from different universities.
Scientists also face a cost problem when working on AI research projects.
Some areas of AI research require access to huge amounts of data and compute resources.
And big techs support seldom comes for free.
What are the effects of the AI brain drain?
This will in turn further widen the AI skills gap.
Consequently, the wages of AI researchers will remain high.
The interest of the commercial sector in AI is primarily to develop products that have business value.
Theyre less interested in projects that serve science and the welfare of humanity in general.
One notable example is DeepMind, one of the handful of research labs that aims to createhuman-level AI.
But it has also restructured the AI lab to create a unit that creates commercial products.
Finally, the AI brain drain and the commercialization of artificial intelligence will mean less transparency in the industry.
For-profit organizations seldom make their source code and AI algorithms available to the public.
They tend to treat them as intellectual property and guard them closely behind their walled gardens.
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