OSS Capital founder says top neural net engineers are getting huge pay packages

With generative AI exploding, top neural net (NN) engineers are now allegedly receiving very handsome compensation packages. The claim was made by OSS Capital founder Joseph Jacks who has heard this from four different “extremely reputable sources”. He has heard that the annual compensation packages that top NN engineers get are now between $5 million - $20 million, and described it as “insanity”.

Jacks discussed some other ideas about the future of the sector. He said that Deep Learning education will be required by those who want to make meaningful contributions. He said that the MIT Deep Learning course has 50,000 students a year and that in five years, the price for top NN talent should fall a lot, possibly by ten times. Despite this, he says these engineers will still be the highest paid across the technology industry “or any profession for that matter”.

One of the most interesting things to have happened in the generative AI-wars is the emergence of OpenAI. OpenAI, while busy in the background, wasn’t much of a consumer-facing tech company. Now it’s a major competitor to Google. Jacks believes that startups in the field will become the next Google and the next Apple in the coming decades if they make fundamental progress in AI without raising large sums of money.

He also claimed that startups that use open-source models and fully open-source their AI infrastructure will outperform those who don’t “by a large margin”. Perhaps bad news for gamers, the generative AI revolution, he says, will keep the cost of GPUs high and in short supply.

If the vast sums of money neural net engineers are receiving are appealing to you, there are plenty of courses online where you can develop your skills including Fast.AI and DeepLearning.AI. The Fast.AI courses have Python as a pre-requisite so if you need to learn about that then check out Google's Python course which goes over the essentials of the language.