AI researchers moving to big companies are now making about $1.5 million a year more than their friends who stayed in colleges.
March 26, 2026
Original Paper
Attention (And Money) Is All You Need: Why Universities Are Struggling to Keep AI Talent
SSRN · 6464680
The Takeaway
This pay gap has grown fivefold since 2001, drawing top minds away from universities and into large firms. The study reveals a fundamental shift in how knowledge is created: as these researchers move to industry, they stop publishing 'open science' for the public and focus instead on creating proprietary patents for their employers.
From the abstract
We construct a novel dataset linking academic publication records to U.S. Census employer-employee data to track 42,000 AI researchers over two decades. We document systematic changes in the allocation of AI talent. Industry increasingly attracts younger and foreign-born researchers, while gender representation improves more in academia. The top 1% of publishing industry scientists now earn $1.5 million more annually than comparable academics, a fivefold increase since 2001. Rising wage premia c