AI experts take much less punishment than NFL quarterbacks do, and some earn just as much, apparently. Forget all the hype around artificial intelligence (AI), if you've really got the skills that Silicon Valley and Wall Street need, you could haul in millions of dollars a year. "Right now, AI is an elitist sport – there are very few people who know how to practice it," said Tom Eck, the CTO of industry platforms at IBM and a software developer who has been involved in AI as far back as the early '90s. "The top-tier AI researchers are getting paid the salaries of NFL quarterbacks, which tells you the demand and the perceived value." While Eck, speaking at the Markets Media's Summer Trading event in New York, didn't specify whether he meant starting quarterbacks or their backups, he did say that the best AI researchers are earning as much as the highest paid position in the National Football League.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.