The going rate for self-driving talent is $10M per person
I have a mixed hands-on practical history, and an eclectic self-taught background in AI, computational intelligence, and machine learning before it was called that. From experience, can say you need the guy who can put it all together in a real working prototype. There are tons of academics smarter than me, and some of my past collegues, but it only counts where the rubber meets the road, aptly punned.<p>I have been self-teaching myself neural networks, genetic programming and algorithms and AI since the 80s. I remember the &#x27;Decade of the Brain&#x27; the 90s and reading Patricia Churchland and Terence Sejnowski&#x27;s book &#x27;The Computational Brain&#x27;. I was also a welder building motorized and pneumatic and hydraulic animiatronics in the 90s. I started to go deep on the engineering, and it helped a lot, but there was a guy I worked with who commanded the time and space and materials in front of him, and had a gut feeling on how to put it all together.<p>Systems integrations is important, but interative and incremental design, also familiar as a design methodology in coding is the way to achieve results. This is because the individual engineering of subsystems, and the subsequent computer modeling fall short of the emergent behaviors of a real physical prototype.<p>If I were hiring, I would not be scouring Udacity or the Unis, but lone wolf garage engineers and tinkerers with the math aptitude too. Two of the successful companies I worked at started in somebody&#x27;s garage, and both were not college educated. Find people who have managed to somehow put together 60% of what you&#x27;re looking for and then fund them and set them loose.<p>Too many of the engineers I&#x27;ve worked with were great with churning out the stuff they were taught, but in the one-offs, or bespoke, which seems to be the fashionable word nowadays, they failed miserably with &#x27;paralysis through analysis&#x27; too much analysis.<p>This is why when I had my own business in the early 2000s, I lamented the death of the trade school in the U.S. It was very difficult finding young people who could actually build stuff. The maker movement is welcoming, but a lot of it tends to be mechatronic, and high tech. You don&#x27;t see too many &#x27;makers&#x27; nowadays that are capable of fabricating without a 3D printer, or making heavy-duty iron mechanical monstrosities like some &#x27;Junkyard Wars&#x27; aficionados were building for a while.<p>This is also why it is hard to find people to work on the BIG projects like tunnel-boring machines (well this has picked up somewhat), or other big equipment. Now imagine finding someone who can also design compliant controls and mechanics for all of this. Certainly worth $10M per person!