The top artificial intelligence gurus are quitting their cushy jobs at top tech giants like Meta, Google, DeepMind, and Open AI to join buzz-creating start-ups like Cohere, Inflection, Anthropic and Adept. The poaching and hiring have become easier thanks to the backing of venture capital firms and billionaires who want to cash in on any success they have. The firms have raised more than $1 billion and are using it to hire skilled resources by paying them more. Read on to know more about these start-ups and their success.
Though this start-up was founded in March
and has less than ten employees, it has raised more than $225 million. It is
focused on making AI products that make it simpler for humans to communicate
with computers. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman leads it. He left his VP
of AI product management and AI policy role at Google. The start-up co-founders
include LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and former DeepMind researcher Karen
Simonyan.
Suleyman has already hired former
colleagues like Former DeepMinder Heinrich Kuttler, who last worked as a
research engineering manager at Meta AI in London. Also, Joe Fenton left his
senior product manager role at Google to become a founding team member at
Inflection. Even Rewon Child, a former Google Brain and OpenAI researcher,
joined Inflection and Maarten Bosma also left a lucrative job as a research
engineer at Google.
Ø Cohere
Cohere, another budding start-up founded in
Toronto in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst, is also doing
well. It has raised around $170 million and wants to create an interface that
allows software developers to use complicated AI technology on their apps.
AI luminaries and DeepMind alums Ed
Grefenstette and Phil Blunsom have joined this firm recently. As Grefenstette
is an honorary professor at UCL and Blunsom is a professor at Oxford, they will
find more fresh recruits soon.
This start-up is led by OpenAI’s former VP
of research, Dario Amodei, and describes itself as an AI safety and research
company. The company wants to build “reliable interpretable, and steerable AI
systems.” Many ex-OpenAI employees, including Jack Clark, Tom Brown, Sam
McCandlish, and Daniela Amodei, have joined Anthropic.
Despite being launched in 2021, the firm
has previously secured $124 million from investors. Recently, it raised another
$580 million in April and has a 41-member team.
Ø Adept
Last on the list is Adept AI Labs, which
was co-founded by CEO David Luan (A former director at Google Research and VP
of engineering at OpenAI), Ashish Vaswani (A former staff research scientist at
Google Brain), and Niki Parmar (formerly a staff research scientist at Google
Brain).
The company has raised $65 million within a
few months of its launch and aims to build general intelligence that enables
humans to work together creatively. It aims to create an AI assistant that
workers can collaborate with to solve any problem. The company wants to make
its AI technology accessible to all in the medium term.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/10/ai-gurus-are-leaving-big-tech-to-work-on-buzzy-new-start-ups.html
https://daystech.org/a-i-gurus-are-leaving-big-tech-to-work-on-buzzy-new-start-ups/
https://www.universalpersonality.com/a-i-gurus-are-leaving-big-tech-to-work-on-buzzy-new-start-ups/