{"id":890682,"date":"2026-09-10T16:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/890682\/"},"modified":"2026-09-10T16:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:26:13","slug":"ai-researchers-reckon-with-the-1-5-million-academia-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/890682\/","title":{"rendered":"AI researchers reckon with the $1.5 million \u2018academia tax\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"A<\/p>\n

Artificial-intelligence researchers say that the idea of leaving academia is tempting, but some nevertheless resist the move.Credit: Jay Janner\/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re looking to make money with your skills in artificial intelligence, academia isn\u2019t the most lucrative destination. The National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducted an analysis1<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"AI<\/p>\n

Source: United States\u2019 National Bureau of Economic Research<\/p>\n

Increasingly, however, researchers are adopting hybrid roles in which they split their time between technology companies and university research, getting the benefits of both.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The freedom to choose<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019s a thing that you possibly don\u2019t get in industry \u2014 in academia, you could have projects going for a decade.\u201d \u2014 Stewart Clark, computational physicist at Durham University, UK<\/p>\n

\u201cAs 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\u2019s tremendously powerful.\u201d \u2014 Jian Ma, computational biologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I decide tomorrow to completely shift the area of research I\u2019m working on, no one can stop me doing that. If you are in a company, it\u2019s 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.\u201d \u2014 Dima Damen, computer scientist at the University of Bristol, UK, and at Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n

Working and publishing openly<\/p>\n

\u201cA 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\u2019s important that someone has the role of doing the work out in the open, reporting on experiments, reporting what works, what doesn\u2019t and sharing artefacts that can be used by anyone to do scientific study or adaptation.\u201d \u2014 Noah Smith, AI researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle<\/p>\n

Mentoring the next generation<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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.\u201d \u2014 Ivor Simpson, informatics researcher at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The professional advisers who can help you to move from academia to industry<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThree of my former PhD students are now faculty members. And I think that\u2019s my greatest achievement, much more than research, because the research you do is going to be state-of-the-art today, but it\u2019s not a legacy.\u201d \u2014 Damen<\/p>\n

\u201cSeeing doctoral students progress is the key thing for me. When you\u2019re holding meetings with them, they\u2019re 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\u2019s a real pleasure to see that academics contribute to the world in this way.\u201d \u2014 Gaurav Sukhatme, computer scientist at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just about money<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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, \u2018Are you mad? You\u2019re losing a huge amount of salary.\u2019 And this is something that obviously hasn\u2019t recovered, because you don\u2019t 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\u2019s the main thing, as well as having a little bit more control over what it could be applied to.\u201d \u2014 Simpson<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some roles in industry, such as managerial research and development, that are quite interesting. But I would say that I\u2019ll 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.\u201d \u2014 Paola Carbone, computational chemist at the University of Manchester, UK<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Leaving academia for industry? Here\u2019s how to handle salary negotiations<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe amount of money that these guys are making at Anthropic and OpenAI is just mind\u2011boggling \u2014 from being my student two years ago to making US$2 million a year. Then again, they basically say, \u2018If I have my job for five years, I\u2019m going to be lucky\u2019, because they see that they\u2019re literally training the large language models that are going to replace them. So, they can see the end of the road.\u201d \u2014 Peter Nugent, physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d \u2014 Vandana Dwarka, mathematician at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Artificial-intelligence researchers say that the idea of leaving academia is tempting, but some nevertheless resist the move.Credit: Jay…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":890683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,2925,5127,3234,1099,56,1100,66,7460,61],"class_list":["post-890682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-careers","tag-computer-science","tag-funding","tag-humanities-and-social-sciences","tag-industry","tag-multidisciplinary","tag-science","tag-society","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/890683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}