Anthropic · Demis Hassabis · Google · Facebook · The Atlantic Technology
Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go?
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Anthropic has poached such an array of high-profile professors that it has become a punch line in academia.
Key facts
- In 2013, Google paid $44 million to acquire a start-up run by a trio of AI researchers from the University of Toronto
- Hassabis has previously said that an inspiration for his company is Bell Labs, the R&D arm of AT&T, which employed some 1,200 Ph
- Facebook then hired Yann LeCun, an NYU professor, to establish the company’s AI-research lab; Uber poached some 40 Carnegie Mellon researchers to work on driverless cars
- On Sunday, a mathematician who works at Anthropic posted that he had used the company’s Fable model during the World Cup final to resolve a nearly 90-year-old mathematical problem
Summary
AI companies are turning into something like mini-universities in their own right. At least three computer-science professors joined Meta’s AI lab in late June. Across these four firms, they found more than 80—most whom are computer scientists. Particularly for AI researchers, these companies have a strong gravitational pull. For decades, universities were the center of AI research. In 2013, Google paid $44 million to acquire a start-up run by a trio of AI researchers from the University of Toronto. Facebook then hired Yann LeCun, an NYU professor, to establish the company’s AI-research lab; Uber poached some 40 Carnegie Mellon researchers to work on driverless cars. As AI has taken center stage, Silicon Valley has intensified its efforts to recruit star researchers—and looked beyond computer-science departments.