Serious question, is this value justified? I don't have any contact with AI development or AI researchers. Do they really bring that much value to the business? It makes sense that for Google, these positions would have almost unlimited clean data. But many companies are not Google.
How do you define "justified"? The field is so new, someone who really knows what they're doing could mean a difference between a large team spending years and getting nowhere remarkable, and improving state of the art every 6 months. With the same exact team. So would you rather get nothing for your money, or something valuable every 6-9 months? That's the question. These people are typically hired after trying pretty hard to get results out of generalists, and failing.
