A.I Gurus are leaving Big Tech for Startups

According to a LinkedIn analysis, it appears that artificial intelligence experts are opting to work in startups that are dedicated to taking AI to the next level. They are giving up their positions in Big Tech companies, such as DeepMind, Google, OpenAI, and Meta to make this move. A number of AI scientists were recently hired by four new AI startups with the best funding and these people previously worked in Big Tech. These startups include Anthropic, Adept, Cohere, and Inflection. Billionaires and venture capital companies are fueling the hiring spree because they want to leverage the success of these startups.

These companies have managed to raise a whopping $1 billion collectively and are taking advantage of it for poaching AI gurus with high salaries from other companies.

Startups Using ‘Architecture’

Back in 2017, a team of Google employees had developed an ‘architecture’ that has come to be known as a ‘transformer’. This is essentially a set of methods and rules that are used for describing a computer system’s organization, functionality, and implementation. The architecture is available for use by anyone and these startups are using it for the development of their products and services.

Thanks to this architecture, it has become possible for companies to scale their AI system in different ways, which means that more capabilities can be added and they can also be made more powerful. Aidan Gomez, the chief executive at Cohere, said that when they scaled the models, the capabilities had grown in an unpredictable way and this had come as a complete surprise.

Some of the AI systems that were developed by a transformer include AlphaStar and AlphaFold by DeepMind, Bert by Google and Dalle-E and GPT-3 by OpenAI.

Inflection AI

Based in California, Inflection AI was founded in March, and even though it does not have even 10 employees, the company has already managed to raise $225 million. The aim of the company is to develop AI software products, which enable better communication between computers and humans.

Mustafa Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind recently left Google where he was the Vice President of AI policy role and AI product management. He founded Inflection AI, along with Karen Simonyan, a former researcher at DeepMind, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn billionaire.

A number of Suleyman’s former colleagues have already joined the company. HeirichHuttler had also worked at DeepMind and joined the Inflection’s founding team in March. He was working in London at Meta AI as a research engineering manager. He is now working on Inflection’s technical business.

Joe Fenton also joined Inflection to work on its product business, after he left the role of a senior product manager in February at Google. The more recent hiring of Inflection include former OpenAI and Google Brain researcher, Rowen Child. Another hire was of Maarten Bosma, who had been working at Google as a research engineer. GreylockPartners is one of the top investors in Inflection AI, which had made bets on the success of Airbnb and Facebook early on.