Yahoo Finance The workers getting rich off the AI revolution – while others lose their jobs
While governments and top tech executives argue about artificial intelligence’s ability to trigger a global conflict, the humans actually working on the technology are busy fighting a war of wages.
The popularity of AI platforms like ChatGPT means that AI engineers can, in 2023, ask for nearly double the salary they received last year, according to jobs board Adzuna.
And even as familiar big tech names such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon cut hundreds of thousands of jobs amid slowing demand and soaring costs, hiring continues at full pace for people with machine learning and computer science degrees.
Companies large and small are fighting tooth and nail to retain the top AI talent, sending salaries spiralling even further as demand for skilled labour threatens to outstrip supply.
One London advertisement from Amazon offers up to $260,000 (£211,000) for a senior applied scientist specialising in generative AI – the same technology that powers ChatGPT.
Over in San Francisco, Google is advertising for a machine learning engineer job paying a base salary of up to $263,000 – plus bonuses, equity (shares) and benefits.
If you have the right combination of skills and professional experience, it’s possible to walk into a high-paying US role and never need to worry about the price of bread again.
Josh Brenner, chief executive of jobs board company Hired, says the competition on both sides of the Atlantic is leading to “increased compensation for these professionals” as businesses race to secure the best and brightest talent.
“Despite the volatility in the tech industry, AI and machine learning engineers, including those specialising in natural language processing, are still in high demand and receive higher salaries on average than standard software engineers,” he says.
Economic conditions have played a large part in this gold rush. Despite stubbornly high inflation, optimistic investors have driven up the value of companies seen to have an advantage in AI and its adjacent industries.
The S&P 500 share price index gained almost a full percentage point in one day this week because of a positive update from Nvidia, which makes the computer circuitry used to power AI.
The California-based company more than doubled its share price to $380 this week, following unexpectedly high sales of its AI-optimised A100 and V100 chips. The knock-on effect sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index up 2.5pc as a result, according to Bloomberg figures.
The AI industry is enjoying a golden moment thanks to the launch of a publicly-accessible version of ChatGPT last year.
That, and the incredible capabilities of the chatbot, have propelled the platform’s maker OpenAI to the status of a household name – and opened the eyes of tech workers to the opportunity of working on AI.
The impact on salaries is clear. Last April an AI engineer in the UK could command an average salary of just £48,159, according to Adzuna; by April 2023, that average had almost doubled to £82,860, while in March this year data scientists could command an average of around £70,000.
Meanwhile, machine learning engineers who were being offered around £60,500 last July are being tempted with salaries of £93,750 in the first three months of 2023, Adzuna found.
ChatGPT’s launch triggered a rush of job applications, sources say, causing more upwards pressure on salaries as recruiters fought to bring the best candidates aboard.
Hired’s Brenner adds: “Machine learning engineers in the UK earn an average salary of £92,000, which is approximately 9pc higher than the average salary of standard software engineers at £83,000”.
Daniel Pell, UK and Ireland vice president for workforce management software company Workday, highlights some analyst predictions forecasting the UK’s AI market will be worth hundreds of billions of pounds by 2033.
That kind of success cannot be reached unless the industry seizes the best talent, Pell adds, but the best way for companies to achieve this is not necessarily by bringing in the most qualified people from outside.
“Shifting towards a skills-based approach can help business leaders avoid the costly exercise of recruiting,” says Pell.
On the other side of the fence, however, smaller companies are struggling to remain competitive when up against the deep pockets of Big Tech and other established industries.
Jan Wolter, managing director of Applause, a company that tests and trains AI algorithms, says it’s tough to obtain the right people with the right combination of skills.
“This is still a nascent space and it’s hard to determine whether a candidate has the requisite experience in AI and [machine learning] modelling,” Wolter adds.
“It’s more likely that someone will have a background in data science than a pure AI background, so you need to hire for skill sets rather than specific experience. So yes, recruitment is competitive but it’s also very selective.”
That added pressure from AI may not last forever. While coders and computer scientists may be comfortably entering the 1pc of Britain’s top earners, those on the opposite end of the scale may find themselves out of work instead.
BT said in mid-May it was cutting around 10,000 jobs to replace them with AI, as part of a wider round of 55,000 redundancies. Industry sources suggest that whoever trains the AI software to take over from unemployed humans may be crafting the means of their own professional downfall.
Economists argue that the effect of AI on jobs will be twofold: wages for some work will fall to zero, their jobs outsourced to machines, while wages for others skyrocket as the specialised skills required to train AI become rarer.
Connor Axiotes, of the Adam Smith Institute, says the ability of advanced AI to make its own decisions could mean that humans will be displaced from the jobs market altogether.
He says such developments “have the potential to make this technology unusually likely to replace cognitive as well as physical labour, as human labour’s comparative advantage of brain power becomes less apparent”.
As a result, humans will have little “comparative advantage” against AI “with which to earn a proper market wage” if advances in the technology continue at their current pace, Axiotes adds.
Legislators are starting to wrestle with these ideas, even as high salaries and the promise of luxurious lifestyles continues to tempt the best talent into AI jobs.
Meanwhile governments are busy rolling out the red carpet for AI pioneers seeking the best talent. Last year Britain opened a fast-track visa scheme aimed at helping employers whisk the highest calibre tech workers into the country.
America’s equivalent H1-B visa programme allows US employers to import up to 85,000 “highly skilled” workers per year – but companies that want to bring overseas AI workers into the US are competing against other high-tech fields, such as engineering.
Caroline Dinenage, then a minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, said in 2021 that the Government’s flagship Global Talent visa route “will have no cap on the number of people able to come to the UK”.
There are some signs that the AI gold rush may be slowing down. Some recruitment industry sources who asked not to be named suggest that average AI salaries may be tapering off as the likes of ChatGPT become more commonplace in everyday life.
For now, a computer science or machine learning doctorate is unquestionably the path to a bumper salary and an easy lifestyle, even if it comes at the expense of their colleagues’ roles.
