I'd say the raiding of AI faculty is a reality, so Facebook's proposal is better than the raw poaching that is occurring. With salaries more than 3-6x higher in industry than in academia, the cost of being in academia is high for AI researchers compared to other fields where it is close to 1.5x. The program I received my PhD from had many faculty leave entirely to join companies, and this "dual affiliation" seems like a reasonable compromise.
Facebook enables PhD students to be funded, provides access to massive resources for building datasets and for compute power, and removes much of the grant writing burden allowing one to focus more on curiosity-driven research.
Faculty have so many things that pull them away from research, grant writing/fundraising, teaching multiple courses, and university service. Because things are moving so fast in AI, it requires more time to stay current on research activities which is hard to do in academia because so much time is spent doing other things.
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I'm a professor working in AI.
I'd say the raiding of AI faculty is a reality, so Facebook's proposal is better than the raw poaching that is occurring. With salaries more than 3-6x higher in industry than in academia, the cost of being in academia is high for AI researchers compared to other fields where it is close to 1.5x. The program I received my PhD from had many faculty leave entirely to join companies, and this "dual affiliation" seems like a reasonable compromise.
Facebook enables PhD students to be funded, provides access to massive resources for building datasets and for compute power, and removes much of the grant writing burden allowing one to focus more on curiosity-driven research.
Faculty have so many things that pull them away from research, grant writing/fundraising, teaching multiple courses, and university service. Because things are moving so fast in AI, it requires more time to stay current on research activities which is hard to do in academia because so much time is spent doing other things.