Author: CADE METZ / Source: New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO — At a conference in Silicon Valley this week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, vowed that his company would “keep building” despite a swirl of questions around the way it has dealt with misinformation and the personal data of its users.
That is certainly true in the important area of artificial intelligence, which Mr. Zuckerberg says can help the social media giant deal with some of those problems.
Facebook is opening new A.I. labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, after hiring three A.I. and robotics professors from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University. The company hopes these seasoned researchers will help recruit and train other A.I. experts in the two cities, Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s chief technology officer, said in an interview.
As it builds these labs, Facebook is adding to pressure on universities and nonprofit A.I. research operations, which are already struggling to retain professors and other employees.
The expansion is a blow for Carnegie Mellon, in particular. In 2015, Uber hired 40 researchers and technical engineers from the university’s robotics lab to staff a self-driving car operation in Pittsburgh. And The Wall Street Journal reported this week that JPMorgan Chase had hired Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon’s head of so-called machine learning technology, to oversee its artificial intelligence operation.
“It is worrisome that they are eating the seed corn,” said Dan Weld, a computer science professor at the University of Washington.
“If we lose all our faculty, it will be hard to keep preparing the next generation of researchers.”With the new labs, Facebook — which already operates A.I. labs in Silicon Valley, New York, Paris and Montreal — is establishing two new fronts in a global competition for talent.
Over the last five years, artificial intelligence has been added to a number of tech products, from digital assistants and online translation services to self-driving vehicles. And the world’s largest internet companies, from Google to Microsoft to Baidu, are jockeying for researchers who specialize in these technologies. Many of them are coming from academia.
“We’re basically going where the talent is,” Mr. Schroepfer said.
But the supply of talent is not keeping up with demand, and salaries have skyrocketed. Well-known researchers are receiving compensation in salary, bonuses and stock worth millions of dollars. Many in the field worry that the talent drain from academia could have a lasting impact in the United States and other countries, simply because schools won’t have the teachers they need to educate the next generation of A.I. experts.
Over the last few months, Facebook approached a number of notable researchers in…
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