AI Transformer Wars for Talent Breaks out in 2022

AI Talent is leaving BigTech and founding their own startups.

Hey Guys,

As the NASDAQ 100 is having a correction moment, this is a good time for talent to leave BigTech and create their own startups. As I have covered A.I startups in the first half of 2022, that’s exactly what I have noticed.

CNBC was the first to cover this as it pertains to Transformer based startups. Their recent article frames it well and focuses on these OpenAI type companies.

Four of the best-funded new AI start-ups — Inflection, Cohere, Adept and Anthropic — have recently poached dozens of AI scientists with backgrounds in Big Tech. I’ve noticed a major exodus myself from Google Brain and Meta AI in recent months. While this talent isn’t just going to Transfer based startups, it’s an interesting story to tell.

A transformer is a deep learning model that adopts the mechanism of self-attention, differentially weighting the significance of each part of the input data. It is used primarily in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). A.I. researchers everywhere including and in particular DeepMind, Microsoft Research and OpenAI are tweaking these large language models with some success.

The BigTech Stock Crash has Shifted Incentives for A.I. Researchers Ready to Cash in

The incentives of Silicon Valley mean moving to new startups can be extremely lucrative for the founders and with the recent stock drop in BigTech it was the perfect storm for a talent exodus from BigTech, where some of those companies could become “value traps”. There’s about a dozen major A.I. startups that are among the chief beneficiary of this trend. Meanwhile startups have started layoffs with a new paradigm of rising interest rates.

The CNBC article says that start-ups’ hiring efforts are being fueled by venture capital firms and billionaires keen to cash in on any success they have. That doesn’t tell the whole truth, it’s also a question of A.I. talent taking their future into their own hands tired of the bureaucracy and in Google’s case, the mismanagement of A.I. talent and ethics. I’ve covered some of this on AiSupremacy already.

The significant talent exodus from Meta AI means the rise of Microsoft Research and the creation of all of these new startups. DeepMind can still be considered by far the best talent pool of A.I. in the world even with depleting Google brain teams. This is of course just my opinion. What do you think?

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