Silicon Valley Is Gobbling Up A.I. Experts
美国硅谷正在广招人工智能人才

By Christina Bonnington
克里斯蒂娜·布灵顿
 

A view of people walking in the Facebook main campus in Menlo Park, California, May 15, 2012.
Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
2012年5月15日，在加州门洛帕克的Facebook主校区里，人们在散步
罗宾·贝克/法新社/盖蒂图片社

Artificial intelligence is the latest Silicon Valley darling. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are using it in their image recognition algorithms, in their voice-based virtual assistants, and in their attempts to curate news and social media posts specifically for your eyes. It’s a hot area for smaller startups, too. Venture capital funding in AI has risen to more than $9.5 billion in the first five months of 2017 from $3.2 billion in all of 2014. It’s been called the biggest investment trend of the year, but it may also be the biggest hiring trend.

人工智能是硅谷最新的宠儿。谷歌、Facebook、亚马逊和苹果都在他们的图像识别算法中使用它，在他们的语音虚拟助手中，他们试图为你的眼睛专门管理新闻和社交媒体文章。对于规模较小的创业公司来说，这也是一个热门领域。今年前5个月，人工智能的风险投资已从2014年的32亿美元增长至95亿美元。这被称为是今年最大的投资趋势，而且也可能是最大的招聘趋势。

While the field dates back to the 1950s, only recently has AI branched out to become a mainstream computer science topic. That being the case, there are only a finite (and relatively small) number of experts in the field—a number that is dwindling in academia due to lucrative offers from tech companies.
对这个领域的研究可以追溯到上世纪50年代，但直到近几年，人工智能才开始成为主流计算机科学的主题。在这种情况下，这一领域的专家数量有限(而且相对较小)——由于科技公司提供的丰厚利润，学术界的专家数量正在减少。

In a report from the New York Times this week, Cade Metz details how big tech firms are luring AI specialists into their fold with salaries of up to $500,000 a year. “In the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills necessary to tackle serious artificial intelligence research, according to Element AI, an independent lab in Montreal,” Metz writes. At Stanford University, four well-known researchers have left or taken leave over the past few years. At another AI hub, the University of Washington, six of the department’s 20 professors are working in the industry on leave or partial leave. If professors and researchers are leaving academia, who’s to teach the next generation of AI specialists?

在本周纽约时报的一篇报道中，Cade         Metz详细描述了科技公司如何将人工智能专家吸引到他们的年薪中，年薪高达50万美元。“在整个世界里，只有不到1万人拥有解决严重人工智能研究的必要技能，”Metz写道，“在蒙特利尔的一个独立实验室里，”Metz写道。在斯坦福大学，四名著名的研究人员在过去的几年里已经离开或离开了。在华盛顿大学的另一个人工智能中心，该部门的20位教授中，有6位正在从事休假或部分休假的工作。如果教授和研究人员离开学术界，谁来教授下一代人工智能专家?

This isn’t the first time a situation like this has happened. In 2015, Uber poached the majority of Carnegie Mellon University’s leading robotics lab to work on the company’s self-driving car project. After initially luring a couple of developers from the National Robotics Engineering Center to join its ranks, Uber eventually hired 40 former CMU staffers for its project (roughly one-third of the NREC’s total staff). This included a number of upper-level employees, including the organization’s director. “These guys, they took everybody,” one source told the Verge.
这样的情况已经不是第一次发生了，2015年，优步（Uber）挖走了卡内基梅隆大学最主要的机器人实验室，以研究该公司的自动驾驶汽车项目。在最初吸引了来自国家机器人工程中心的几名开发者加入之后，优步最终雇佣了40名前CMU的员工(大约是NREC总员工的三分之一)。这包括许多高级职员，包括组织的主管。“这些家伙，他们把所有人都带走了”一名知情人士透露。