The World Needs Millions Of Qualified AI Engineers, But There Are Only 3 Lakh Of Them Right Now

As popular as AI has become right now in the tech industry, there just aren¡¯t enough trained engineers to support the boom. This is a fact.

According to a new report from Chinese tech giant Tencent (which recently surpassed Facebook in terms of value), that need for AI researchers is much greater than we imagined. The Tencent Research Institute¡¯s report says that there are just 300,000 AI researchers and engineers in the entire world, and yet the ¡°market demand¡± is for millions of them.

Of course, there¡¯s a limit to how accurate these figures can be, given their speculative nature. In fact, Tencent doesn¡¯t even specify how it arrived at these numbers, but it fits the existing narrative in the field of AI development. As tech giants around the world scramble to snatch up all the AI researchers they can, it¡¯s driven up the salaries for all existing experts in a massive way.

We¡¯ve already reported how at least one Chinese startup is throwing yearly salaries of $1 million at software engineers to keep them close at hand. Similarly, veteran AI engineers in China average between $1 million to $2 million a year, with even the more inexperience guaranteed a base pay of between $300,000 to $500,000 a year.

The ¡®2017 Global AI Talent White Paper¡¯ by Tencent seeks to answer why this shortage has come about, and they believe it¡¯s because of education.

The report estimates that 200,000 of the 300,000 existing AI researchers are already employed, some even outside the tech industry. The remaining 100,000 however, are still studying.

Of course, so many more people are now attending machine learning courses across the world as they gauge that the demand for these professionals is going up, but completing their education before actually joining the AI development workforce takes time. Time in which the disparity between what we need and what we have has arisen.

Reuters

On the other hand, the report also talks about competition between countries, as far as developing and utilising AI talent is concerned. It points out the US, UK, China, and Japan as the major players here, with Israel and Canada gaining worthy mentions. According to the report, Canada has attracted many research lab investments from major companies, thanks to its strong education system, while the UK is more forward on the ¡°ethical and legal aspects¡± of AI, and Japan leads in robotics.

However, it¡¯s the US that¡¯s supposedly ¡°far ahead¡± thanks to more universities teaching machine learning and other related courses. Because of this, Tencent estimates more than 1,000 of the 2,600 AI startups in the world are based in the US, while China only has 600.

Yet, it¡¯s not possible for the company to make any predictions for which country will lead in AI in the future. However, the Chinese government has previously stated its goal of becoming a world leader in AI by 2030, so you know for sure it¡¯s going to be vying for the top spot, and driving forward AI development in the process.