AI researchers reckon with the $1.5 million ‘academia tax’

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. AI researchers reckon with the $1.5 million ‘academia tax’ Academics explain that their research freedom beats the increased salary they would get in the corporate sector, but emerging hybrid models might allow them to get the best of both worlds. If you’re looking to make money with your skills in artificial intelligence, academia isn’t the most lucrative destination. The National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducted an analysis1 of AI researchers and identified those with similar specialisms across academia and the private sector. They found that the top 1% of industry authors earn US$1.5 million more per person every year than do their academic counterparts. Nature spoke to academics, mostly in the United States and Europe, and many mentioned students who have gone to work for firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI, both in San Francisco, California, and earn millions of dollars a year. Despite that, those who remain in academia say that the freedom to choose their research and the joy of training the next generation trumps the increased salaries of industry, though many still gripe about the issues they face in finding stable funding streams. Increasingly, however, researchers are adopting hybrid roles in which they split their time between technology companies and university research, getting the benefits of both. Here, 14 university academics who specialize in AI and computational science share their reasons for staying in academia and the factors that might push them into industry. The freedom to choose “I’m not yet convinced that the extra money is worth the loss of the ability to do research in the areas you find interesting in the long term. It’s a thing that you possibly don’t get in industry — in academia, you could have projects going for a decade.” — Stewart Clark, computational physicist at Durham University, UK “As scientists and educators, academia gives us an unusual amount of freedom to decide what questions we want to work on and what we think matters. I think that’s tremendously powerful.” —Jian Ma, computational biologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania “If I decide tomorrow to completely shift the area of research I’m working on, no one can stop me doing that. If you are in a company, it’s a completely different game. When you are leading an academic research laboratory, you are completely at the steering wheel and the freedom that you get there is very special.” — Dima Damen, computer scientist at the University of Bristol, UK, and at Google DeepMind. Working and publishing openly “A lot of people have bought into the idea that if you want to be on the cutting edge, you have to be at one of the big companies. But for me, I think it’s important that someone has the role of doing the work out in the open, reporting on experiments, reporting what works, what doesn’t and sharing artefacts that can be used by anyone to do scientific study or adaptation.” — Noah Smith, AI researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle Mentoring the next generation “The impact you can have from teaching is amazing. I still get e-mails from students from my early years of teaching. You get that more personal view of your impact on society.” — Ivor Simpson, informatics researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK “Three of my former PhD students are now faculty members. And I think that’s my greatest achievement, much more than research, because the research you do is going to be state-of-the-art today, but it’s not a legacy.” — Damen “Seeing doctoral students progress is the key thing for me. When you’re holding meetings with them, they’re the experts and they know more than anybody else about the subject of their dissertation. And they go out into the world and make an impact. It’s a real pleasure to see that academics contribute to the world in this way.” — Gaurav Sukhatme, computer scientist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles It’s not just about money “When I first moved back to academia, a lot of my friends from my PhD and from wider life were asking me why I was doing this. They said, ‘Are you mad? You’re losing a huge amount of salary.’ And this is something that obviously hasn’t recovered, because you don’t get paid very well as an academic. A lot of my undergraduates will go off and get paid more than I do, which is disappointing. However, I wanted my research to have impact beyond the generation of revenue. I think that that’s the main thing, as well as having a little bit more control over what it could be applied to.” — Simpson “There are some roles in industry, such as managerial research and development, that are quite interesting. But I would say that I’ll think very carefully before trading the freedom I have to collaborate for a managerial role. Then you have to abandon science and I am enjoying it too much so far.” — Paola Carbone, computational chemist at the University of Manchester, UK “The amount of money that these guys are making at Anthropic and OpenAI is just mind‑boggling — from being my student two years ago to making US$2 million a year. Then again, they basically say, ‘If I have my job for five years, I’m going to be lucky’, because they see that they’re literally training the large language models that are going to replace them. So, they can see the end of the road.” — Peter Nugent, physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California “It’s definitely not all about the money. In my case, I think I can offer a unique perspective: I had the money. When I was working in investment banking, it was crazy; the hours are crazy. We have deadlines, and academics still have to work really hard, but the hours in banking were a different level.” — Vandana Dwarka, mathematician at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands Enjoying our latest content? Log in or create an account to continue Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research