The Problem with the AI Spring: where the hiring is coming from?
Machines have become so smart that they are taking over our daily activities from driving to writing. Nick Gallimore, a professional recruiter in the artificial intelligence area is trying to find an answer to the question “Where is the hiring going to come in the new world?”.
When I heard Stephen Hawking say that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a threat to the human race , I knew that 2015 was going to be an interesting year.
Suddenly (or so it seems), it looks like the AI Winter is over. The Turing test was passed. AI start-ups are changing hands for crazy money. We can translate on the fly. Computers can (and do) now write newspaper articles. Before we get into a debate about how much of this is actual research/engineering success and how much is down to improved marketing, there is no doubt that this speed of development in the AI field has had a huge impact on the fields that go together to “make” mainstream AI. This includes NLP, Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Machine Learning and Text Analytics.
But, as the hype surrounding the Internet of Things and Wearable technology has increased, the interest in AI and all its related technologies has surged, and so have the investment dollars. In fact, with some people valuing the AI industry at some £30 billion, now is probably the most exciting time in history to be working in the AI domain. The AI Spring is here.
Now, we’re as excited about all this as the next person, but there’s just one small problem with all this. Where is the hiring going to come from?
Outside the world of big companies, who are ahead of the game when it comes to attracting high-profile academics, getting access to talent is difficult, and expensive.
On the other side of the fence, from the individual job-seeker’s perspective, the field can seem puzzling. Amidst all the hype and despite the dollars being poured in, many skilled job seekers arrive at the industry’s door waiting for the phone to ring with the countless opportunities they’ve been reading about, only to discover that real opportunities are pretty thin on the ground and those that do exist are in a different country (or even continent).
It is this talent interface that will dictate whether this re-awakening of interest in AI will stick or whether winter will return. Can hiring keep up with demand? Can academia and industry work together to put the right people in the right places?
NLPPeople.com wants to bridge the gap. We’ve got a tonne of work still to do but we’ve made a start. Since we started out, we’ve posted over 4,000 jobs from the NLP, MT, Data Mining and localisation industries. We’ve registered over 2,000 candidate profiles. We are already the number one place to connect talent and companies in the AI space, and we’re growing in 2015.
We want to help connect research departments, engineering teams, large corporations and entrepreneurs reach out to and engage with the talent they need.
To do this properly, we’d love to hear your thoughts on our progress so far.