AI salaries dwarfing academia: Top 1% earn $2 million/year
AI companies are making big moves to attract top talent, offering pay packages as high as $20 million.
According to a new US study, the best-paid 1% in the industry earn nearly $2 million a year, about $1.5 million more than what their academic peers get.
The pay gap
In the US AI engineers' median total base pay is about $134,188; depending on experience and location, figures span roughly from around $103,000 to about $172,000, with higher medians in cities like San Francisco (approximately $164,500), while researchers average just under $100,000.
This big difference is pulling many experts away from university jobs and into industry roles.
Industry vs. academia
AI companies aren't just paying more. They're also giving researchers access to better funding, bigger datasets, and serious computing power.
That's made machine learning professors especially valuable in tech, leaving universities struggling to keep up.
Implications for research
With so much talent moving into private companies, there's concern that cutting-edge research could become less open and more exclusive.
While industry investment is speeding up progress in AI, it's also changing where (and how) breakthroughs happen.