Downvoted.

"high payouts"? Good programmers are worth their weight in gold. (As for AI researchers, bad ones are worthless, good-but-not-good-enough ones will simply kill us all, and good-enough ones are literally beyond value...) NYT:

Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that start-ups cannot match Google salaries. Google declined to comment.

"half pay (and half time)"? I'm just a programmer, not an AI researcher, but I'm confident that this applies equally: it is ridiculously hard to apply concentrated thought to solving a problem when you have to split your focus. As Paul Graham said:

One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking is very long: it might take an hour just to load a problem into your head. So the cost of having someone from personnel call you about a form you forgot to fill out can be huge.

This is why hackers give you such a baleful stare as they turn from their screen to answer your question. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.