I believe that a contributing factor to the pay gap in Europe is the fact that we have so many languages, that we are too segregated to create the same level of competitiveness as seen in the US.
This means that each country is fairly protective of its people, and even though EU has free movement of labour, the language and culture barrier is strong, and internationals have a harder time to get hired, unless the speak the local language.
So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.
It also means that despite being a single market you can’t realistically launch a product across the EU. A SV startup can immediately address the whole US (if they don’t have a physical presence), but an EU startup has to go country by country. That means growth is slower, and talent is less competed for.
After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.
> and even though EU has free movement of labour, the
language and culture barrier is strong, and
internationals have a harder time to get hired,
unless they speak the local language.
Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries.
Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language.
Is that really true? Everyone in science speaks English and DeepMind, based in the UK, is in fact one of the world's top AI research hubs. Their papers are consistently excellent and of course DeepMind's workforce comes from around the world.
That's the European AI hub, right there.
The issue here isn't the language barrier. The issue is one that goes largely unstated in the ELLIS letter (it's a call for action, not really a plan). Which is this ... remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again?
DeepMind was founded by a Brit - the guy who once worked on Theme Park and other much loved British games. He built up an absolutely top class research team out of nowhere, based purely on VC funding, then sold to Google not only because of money but because Google also built a world class AI research team out in California, and it made sense to join forces so they could work together on things like TPUs.
And why shouldn't the European AI hub have joined forces with the US AI hub? What benefit could there be from preserving institutional and funding barriers between Google and DeepMind? The letter sort of dances around the edges of this question, but ultimately the answer is purely politics.
It says things like
"This weakens Europe"
and
"we want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world"
and
"many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive"
These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists.
AI research is entirely open. Having a new academic research hub in the EU-that-isn't-the-UK won't change the access those European countries have to the underlying research papers or techniques. They can use AI just the same regardless of where the research is being done. Maybe China would try to close up their researchers, but America and the UK certainly won't.
So if European companies are "perceived as uncompetitive" or are not "shaping the world" due to their poor use of AI (this is a dubious theory to begin with) then the solution is for more European companies to download TensorFlow and Torch and get cracking. It isn't for money to be poured into academics who will take it, write a few papers and then go straight into industry anyway.
From an outsider, I can tell you what. It's not the langauges.
It's the culture, it's the work/life balance. It's things like
working reasonable hours, spending time with family & friends.
Having long holidays, take time off from work to care for a newborn.
It's things like GDPR.
America is brutal, America is a gladiator pit, winner take all.
Money above all things, the religion is capitalism. Make money or
die trying and roll over anyone in the way.
Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research. We have a European platform for Big Data and AI - Hops. It's open-source. It has nice properties, but it is harder to bootstrap an ecosystem outside the valley:
(1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata
(2) GPU support in HopsYARN
(3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow serving. Spark support, too.
However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a talk on the platform at CERN last week:
> Our big problem in Europe is not basic research, it's systems research.
Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry On.
The headline seems misleading. They're not planning one "huge hub" in one location. Instead, they're planning a bunch of mid-sized institutes spread across different countries, each with "hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists".
That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company.
That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.
I think it would go standard European way - build an institution by a top-down directive reflecting political will, shake each others hands, then a few years later cry that you have all this outdated infrastructure but no inventive people working for you nor any bleeding-edge results, as all relevant people are snatched up and overpaid by industry giants.
I think it's worth experimenting with a more diverse and distributed model because the 'one megahub' structure also has disadvantages, low spread beyond the borders of the tech industry being one example.
Especially countries like Germany with diverse industrial production spread out across the country might benefit more from having technology clusters spread out as well.
Even Silicon Valley companies like Google have at least partially taken on this approach by opening labs in Toronto or Paris, Amazon plans to create about a hundred jobs around Stuttgart and Thübingen.
I think a hundred researchers/engineers is well beyond a midsize company remote office, because the caliber of people and mission will be very different. DeepMind is less than a thousand people, and was probably on the order of a few hundred when it became famous.
the scientists say the proposed Ellis institute is essential to avoid brain drain to big tech firms
They don’t say tho’ the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What’s in it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job? ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would evaporate overnight.
I’m no AI guru but I’m a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage and compute at scale, and they’ll need people like that too, why would someone like me choose this path? What’s the offer?
Well, a nice office in a "culturally rich city with dozen of events, museums and world-class cuisine"?! Like it's done for all other industries. Some nice polished marketing and the fear of missing out if you don't go to the place where all the "exciting things happen".
Question for people knowledgeable on the topic: are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term? The article mentions CERN; are there others?
I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.
It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture.
Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes...
You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.
Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement.
Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander)
The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).
I'm familiar with the European Molecular Biology Lab [1] (worked there), which is one of the best research centres in cell and molecular biology as well as bioinformatics in the world. The only real prerequisite for working there is excellence. It seems like this new AI proposal is modeled after the EMBL model, with one headquarter and several other locations around Europe. At least in the case of the EMBL, it worked incredibly well and created a great joint European atmosphere which really motivated everyone to do their best.
Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry.
I find the comparison with CERN (made by the Guardian article; CERN is not mentioned in the open letter) misleading and somewhat troubling.
As of 2016 (last year for which there are figures; new ones should be out in a couple of weeks) CERN had 82 research physicists on staff, out of a total headcount of 2531 [1].
The vast majority of researchers working at CERN are associates (982), users and visitors from other institutions, mainly universities in member countries. CERN's primary role is to provide shared facilities (accelerators and detectors) which are too expensive for individual members, not to employ researchers.
The equivalent in machine learning would be shared computing, data collection & labeling resources capable of competing with what Google, Facebook etc have to offer. A state-led initiative on shared computing resources might be more cost-effective than buying time on Google Cloud, but the main thing could well turn out to be pooling data from national databases. Yay?
I don't even think CERN, Higgs boson included, is worth the man hours or cash invested...
HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
>are there many examples of planned efforts like this actually working, where some group is able to attract top talent in some industry and keep it for the long term?
OpenAI, Allen Institute for AI, MIRI, etc. are quite successful in the AI industry. Those are all in the US and pay competitive salaries though. It seems to me that Salary is a primary driver here, why stay at Cambridge for 40k gbp/yr when you could do the same research at Google Brain for $200k+ but if those two numbers aren't so out of wack I think it becomes a much more difficult choice.
German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry doesn't know how to attract good people.
To put some data points there (in EUR)
1. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions
2. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions
3. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions
4. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions
Source: Friends and family and me
The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?)
Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU population)
I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of 120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.
Note, research and scientific staff is equally underpaid, if not more, in the US.
Since fundamental physics and bioinformatics have been mentioned several times in this thread, if you're curious, look into salaries at places like the National Laboratories, or even independent labs like the Allen Institute.
The market distortion in the field of AI/ML isn't as simple as poor wages in academic research. There are many strong European industries that could benefit from more AI/ML and that can definitely afford attractive salaries. Those jobs already exist around the German car makers for instance. Unfortunately, there's always more money to be made selling ads.
Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering or just lower average GDP per capita? (I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason.) Swiss pay is supposed to be quite competitive with American, and other Western European countries are right around their borders.
Doesn't this happen to US universities as well? I bet Mercedes et al could do the same as Google if they didn't require you to move to company towns in the middle of nowhere.
I think you're thinking of Audi (Ingolstadt, Neckarsulm) or Volkswagen (Wolfsburg) middle of nowhere towns with a severe lack of estrogen. Mercedes/Daimler and Porsche are in Stuttgart, a major city (for Germany at least). BMW is in Munich, doesn't get much more major city than that.
The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling the whole team or slacking off.
I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread. The variety of experiences and viewpoints provided an incredible insight to someone who's been mostly in the USA for the last 2 decades. My conclusions:
a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US,
b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization.
c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations.
d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".]
e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.
SV has always been heavily subsidized. A lot of the fundamental tech comes from government research projects. Startups have access to easy capital and there is no transparency of the 10/1 or 100/1 failures, how this is sustained and where all the money is coming from.
There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late.
The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated 'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value.
Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets' completely fails to account and value these and other critical social investments. We make the narratives we want.
All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.
This reminds me of the European attempt at competing with the American BRAIN Initiative [1]:
"The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP."
The question is really if Europe can compete with the whole US ecosystem without protectionist policies (and there justified). Nowhere is the US domination more visible than in the tech sector, where Europe essentially is a tech vassal state. The European countries need to build not only an AI hubs, but also an competitive business ecosystem that attracts top talent through salaries, opportunities, challenges and benefits. I don't think there is much appetite in the European population for competing on lavish salaries and raw capitalistic incentiments (both categories in which US leads).
European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship, but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central-european countries.
There's actually something fascinating about the dominance / vassal premise: it applies within the US, and it applies within Europe as well.
Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech, with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise.
The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to an epic degree.
How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states to France or Germany.
US hardly has a monopoly on AI. Canada and China are also leading countries. It's great that the EU wants to invest too, the more the better! Science doesn't hold allegiance to any country and never should.
This is great news. We need more tech hubs and more competition in the tech industry. I'm still confused as to why europe decided to cede the entire tech industry to the US. Do europeans love us this much? That they want us to have all money/technology?
But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should have 2 or 3 tech hubs.
Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.
is it just me or does the guardian symbol in the browser tab (white G on a black disc) always look like the pirate party symbol (black flag on white background in a black circle)?
I don;t know about AI, but when it comes to using formal methods to nail down software development and make it reliable, the EU is already outpacing the US.
Considering the vast majority of all CS and modern software languages and practices have originated in the US in the first place and the US still, by any rational or unbiased measure, has the largest and most innovative tech companies in the world, I am not totally convinced of what you're claiming
[+] [-] Systemic33|8 years ago|reply
So the end results is that talent is spread across, and no single country has ability to become the place to be.
[+] [-] Joeri|8 years ago|reply
After brexit I’d like to see business & gov across the EU standardize on english as lingua franca to enable faster growth.
[+] [-] enriquto|8 years ago|reply
Certainly not in all fields. In all the math labs that I know (from France, UK, Italy) more than half of the researchers are from other countries.
Of course, if you want to teach, it is much easier to get hired if you already speak the language.
(edit: format of the quote)
[+] [-] peoplewindow|8 years ago|reply
That's the European AI hub, right there.
The issue here isn't the language barrier. The issue is one that goes largely unstated in the ELLIS letter (it's a call for action, not really a plan). Which is this ... remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again?
DeepMind was founded by a Brit - the guy who once worked on Theme Park and other much loved British games. He built up an absolutely top class research team out of nowhere, based purely on VC funding, then sold to Google not only because of money but because Google also built a world class AI research team out in California, and it made sense to join forces so they could work together on things like TPUs.
And why shouldn't the European AI hub have joined forces with the US AI hub? What benefit could there be from preserving institutional and funding barriers between Google and DeepMind? The letter sort of dances around the edges of this question, but ultimately the answer is purely politics.
It says things like
"This weakens Europe"
and
"we want the best basic research to be performed in Europe, to enable Europe to shape how machine learning and modern AI change the world"
and
"many European companies whose future business crucially depends on AI are not perceived as competitive"
These are all political goals, worse, they are not logical thinking at all - not a good look for a bunch of scientists.
AI research is entirely open. Having a new academic research hub in the EU-that-isn't-the-UK won't change the access those European countries have to the underlying research papers or techniques. They can use AI just the same regardless of where the research is being done. Maybe China would try to close up their researchers, but America and the UK certainly won't.
So if European companies are "perceived as uncompetitive" or are not "shaping the world" due to their poor use of AI (this is a dubious theory to begin with) then the solution is for more European companies to download TensorFlow and Torch and get cracking. It isn't for money to be poured into academics who will take it, write a few papers and then go straight into industry anyway.
[+] [-] acct1771|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrshawkes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KKKKkkkk1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segmondy|8 years ago|reply
America is brutal, America is a gladiator pit, winner take all. Money above all things, the religion is capitalism. Make money or die trying and roll over anyone in the way.
[+] [-] kome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesblonde|8 years ago|reply
(1) HDFS compatible FS with distributed metadata
(2) GPU support in HopsYARN
(3) UI to develop Keras/TensorFlow apps in jupyter, deploy on tensorflow serving. Spark support, too.
However, getting it 'out there' is still a challenge from Europe. Here is a talk on the platform at CERN last week:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/716743/
More talks here:
http://www.logicalclocks.com/eventscustom/
[+] [-] chrisseaton|8 years ago|reply
Hmm maybe we mean different things by 'systems research', but I'm in systems research and we're relatively strong in this area in Europe! Notable systems groups at Cambridge, Kent, Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, EPFL, ETH, Linz, lots of smaller ones. Major influential systems projects started in Europe like Graal. Conferences which attract Americans to fly over like ECOOP and Curry On.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|8 years ago|reply
That approach is understandable politically, but it seems much less likely to have the intended effect. If the goal is to kick-start a knowledge cluster in Europe that can compete with the Bay Area, then it seems much more likely to succeed if the funding and talent is concentrated in a single site. "Hundreds of computer engineers" is equivalent to a mid-size remote office of a major tech company.
That's just an observation, though. I realize that the choice probably isn't this plan vs. one mega-site. More realistically it's this plan vs. nothing at all, or vs. competing piecemeal efforts by various EU member states.
[+] [-] bitL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|8 years ago|reply
Especially countries like Germany with diverse industrial production spread out across the country might benefit more from having technology clusters spread out as well.
Even Silicon Valley companies like Google have at least partially taken on this approach by opening labs in Toronto or Paris, Amazon plans to create about a hundred jobs around Stuttgart and Thübingen.
[+] [-] Eridrus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|8 years ago|reply
They don’t say tho’ the mechanism by which it will accomplish this. What’s in it for the individual researchers who choose this path over an industry job? ITER only exists because there is no well-funded private-sector fusion research. If Musk or Bezos or Gates entered that game it and CERN would evaporate overnight.
I’m no AI guru but I’m a pretty decent infra engineer who can wrangle storage and compute at scale, and they’ll need people like that too, why would someone like me choose this path? What’s the offer?
Genuinely curious.
[+] [-] molteanu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thaumaturgy|8 years ago|reply
I would guess that most concentrations of talent are an unpredictable side-effect of some environmental factor.
[+] [-] ItsMe000001|8 years ago|reply
Silicon Valley: https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
It wasn't planned as such, but the outcome is a result of unlimited debt-based US government spending in WWII to win the electronics war. Only after creating very fertile soil did private enterprise enter the picture.
Also, anything war related, ever, including rockets, airplanes, anything that shoots and explodes, submarines, the Internet,... Part of it is that the public is perfectly willing to have "central planning" and pretty much unlimited tax-based spending for military purposes, but try to do get them to accept the same for civilian purposes...
You may also check out the economic history of Japan and South Korea, but also how European countries like the UK rose to power. LOTS of government planning.
Then there is the entire exploration of the world, done mostly by governments, and even when it was private entities it was with very heavy government support and involvement.
Did you know that Gregor Mendel, the monk who did the experiment with the peas that is seen as the basis for genetics, was not an underemployed monk working on his own, but part of a very organized business-government-church effort to support local industry? I think it was about how to get better wool producing sheep: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 (MIT Prof. Eric S. Lander)
The "market" is not magic that does everything. It only works well under specific circumstances - and those are exactly the scenarios the books will pick. Read (economist) authors like Ha-Joon Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang).
[+] [-] sveme|8 years ago|reply
Obviously, there is currently much more money in AI in the industry, so I guess it will be hard for such a research centre to compete with industry. The wage differential between biotech industry and EMBL is much less than that of a hypothetical EAIL and the software industry.
[1] https://www.embl.org/
[+] [-] T-A|8 years ago|reply
As of 2016 (last year for which there are figures; new ones should be out in a couple of weeks) CERN had 82 research physicists on staff, out of a total headcount of 2531 [1].
The vast majority of researchers working at CERN are associates (982), users and visitors from other institutions, mainly universities in member countries. CERN's primary role is to provide shared facilities (accelerators and detectors) which are too expensive for individual members, not to employ researchers.
The equivalent in machine learning would be shared computing, data collection & labeling resources capable of competing with what Google, Facebook etc have to offer. A state-led initiative on shared computing resources might be more cost-effective than buying time on Google Cloud, but the main thing could well turn out to be pooling data from national databases. Yay?
[1] https://cds.cern.ch/collection/CERN%20Annual%20Personnel%20S...
[+] [-] mjfl|8 years ago|reply
HBP doesn't seem worth it. ITER is a huge failure that is scheduled to receive billions more euros for more than 25 more years. I don't know... Europe seems to fall victim to these sort of things very readily.
[+] [-] carlmr|8 years ago|reply
Many, I'm not sure, but how about Silicon Valley? Which was borne mostly out of government backing of military projects and the university system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley#History_(1971_a...
[+] [-] nunya213|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] candiodari|8 years ago|reply
1) why this is happening
2) why this effort won't change a thing
They could, you know, pay competitive wages. Ridiculous suggestion, I know, at this point that'd be a 5x and more (500% and more) raise.
[+] [-] dmichulke|8 years ago|reply
German media constantly complains about "IT expert shortage" yet salaries grow like 3% per year. So IMO it's either not a shortage or the German industry doesn't know how to attract good people.
To put some data points there (in EUR)
1. Germany Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 22k after deductions
2. Germany AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 50k after deductions
3. Luxembourg Uni Doctorate Position: 32k, 26k after deductions
4. Luxembourg AI / Data Scientist Position: 80k, 60k after deductions
Source: Friends and family and me
The above two countries belong arguably to the economical top tier, yet they can hardly compete with a US Senior Software developer (>= 100k$?)
Now imagine how the non-top tier countries fare (i.e., 80% of the EU population)
I was an AI researcher and now work as ML/AI/Data Scientist consultant (mostly for non-European companies) and I yet have to see that European job offer of 120k€ per year, hell, make that 100k€.
[+] [-] hocuspocus|8 years ago|reply
Since fundamental physics and bioinformatics have been mentioned several times in this thread, if you're curious, look into salaries at places like the National Laboratories, or even independent labs like the Allen Institute.
The market distortion in the field of AI/ML isn't as simple as poor wages in academic research. There are many strong European industries that could benefit from more AI/ML and that can definitely afford attractive salaries. Those jobs already exist around the German car makers for instance. Unfortunately, there's always more money to be made selling ads.
[+] [-] nopinsight|8 years ago|reply
Is it because of the culture of not valuing software as much as 'hard' engineering or just lower average GDP per capita? (I read someone commenting that pay for software engineers in Japan and Korea are similarly uncompetitive for the former reason.) Swiss pay is supposed to be quite competitive with American, and other Western European countries are right around their borders.
[+] [-] sveme|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tormeh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carlmr|8 years ago|reply
The bigger problem I see is German company's unwillingness to pay engineers more for performance. You basically get the same salary whether you're pulling the whole team or slacking off.
[+] [-] ageofwant|8 years ago|reply
The schadenfreude is strong with this one. Maybe next time try treating your researchers less like cattle and start paying them market value salaries.
[+] [-] giardini|8 years ago|reply
a) There's not a snowball's chance in Hell that a European AI hub compete with the US,
b) Europe remains far more fragmented than I thought it was; even more fragmented than it appeared when I was in high school. "Brexit" may actually increase Europe's (and Britain's) organization.
c) Britain and Europe have tons of good people but a lack of organization suitable for pure research, be it by governments, corporations, "hubs", or non-governmental organizations.
d) China is similarly SNAFU'd but worse in some respects (unsettled markets, lack of transparency & property rights). Luckily, there doesn't appear to be a ghost of a chance of having one of China's many languages adopted as a scientific "lingua franca". [Note to self: cross the (formerly) relevant item off my "bucket list".]
e) Perhaps restoring near-universal use of the character encoding UTF-16 or even US-ASCII is not a completely dead idea but merely one to be delayed until the adoption of English as the "lingua franca" of the Internet and Europe, salvaging much-needed bandwidth. Time will tell.
[+] [-] throw2016|8 years ago|reply
There is definitely govt money including from the CIA, NSA at work here. So there is no reason the EU cannot do the same, infact they are late.
The open source movement has also played a key role in most of the SV success stories in the recent past. Zuckerberg, Page and others are the celebrated 'free market' 'wealth creators' but the work of Stallman, Torvalds, Rasmus and thousands of others have undeniably added billions of dollars of value.
Our currently ideological narrative of 'wealth creators' and 'free markets' completely fails to account and value these and other critical social investments. We make the narratives we want.
All the SV money further subsidizes companies like Uber and other startups hungry for market share, who can under price and run out competition in other markets which is dumping. Its just that no one is going after them in Europe and elsewhere yet but the rules are there and can be enforced when needed.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
"The key difference between Europe's HBP and the U.S.'s BRAIN Initiative is that the latter does not depend on a single scientific vision. Instead many teams will compete for grants and lead innovation into different, unplanned directions. Competition is happening via the nimh's traditional peer-review process, which prevents the conflicts of interest that plagued decision making at the HBP. Peer review is not perfect—it tends to favor known scientific paradigms—and American science funding has plenty of problems of its own. But the BRAIN Initiative's more competitive and transparent decision making is far removed from the political black box in Brussels that produced the HBP."
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-bra...
[+] [-] l5870uoo9y|8 years ago|reply
European leaders can just look at China and see successful protectionist policies. It makes sense to have some policies not only in US-EU relationship, but also inside EU that spreads the talent on a regional level so regions don't just get drained. This is also a big issue for East- and Central-european countries.
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
Silicon Valley, Boston, NY, Seattle, and a few others dominate the US on tech, with the rest of the US mostly fitting into your tech vassal state premise.
The exact same thing is true within Europe for industry and tech. Germany overwhelmingly dominates Europe on auto manufacturing for example. What kind of cars are Russia, Spain, Portugal, UK, Poland, Ukraine, Greece, etc producing? The Germans are out selling and out producing the rest of Europe to an epic degree.
How many Airbus planes - and or what share of components - are manufactured in Romania, Czech, Greece or Poland? In Europe these are industrial vassal states to France or Germany.
[+] [-] tensor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] youpassbutter|8 years ago|reply
But this doesn't go far enough. Europe has 600 million people. They should have 2 or 3 tech hubs.
Look at what china is doing. They are developing their own tech industry. That is what europe should do. Foster their own tech industry.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
Mercedes does most of it's self-driving research in the US.
[0]: https://angel.co/job-collections/top-self-driving-cars-start...
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