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Britain Faces an AI Brain Drain as Tech Giants Raid Top Universities (telegraph.co.uk) 68

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
British outlet The Telegraph reports: Britain faces an artificial intelligence "brain drain" as Silicon Valley raids its top universities for talent, data compiled by The Telegraph shows. Around a third of leading machine learning and AI specialists who have left the UK's top institutions are currently working at Silicon Valley tech firms. More than a tenth have moved to North American universities and nearly a tenth are currently working for other smaller US companies. Meanwhile just one in seven have joined British start-ups.
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Britain Faces an AI Brain Drain as Tech Giants Raid Top Universities More

Britain Faces an AI Brain Drain as Tech Giants Raid Top Universities

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  • New Math? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by TWX ( 665546 )

    More than a tenth have moved to North American universities and nearly a tenth are currently working for other smaller US companies. Meanwhile just one in seven have joined British start-ups.

    So, 10% have sought employment with American firms. and a little over 14% are working for British firms? First, that means that more are working for British firms than have left for America, and second, the numbers for those that have left are only 24%, so about a quarter. Does that mean that three quarters or 75% of

    • More than a tenth have moved to North American universities and nearly a tenth are currently working for other smaller US companies. Meanwhile just one in seven have joined British start-ups.

      So, 10% have sought employment with American firms. and a little over 14% are working for British firms?

      Nope. A little over 14% are working for British startup firms. The number that are working for British firms which aren't start-ups is not listed here.

    • Great reading comprehension there. You just missed the following insignificant part: Around a third of leading machine learning and AI specialists who have left the UK's top institutions are currently working at Silicon Valley tech firms. If you add the more than a tenth [... at] North American universities and the nearly a tenth [... at] other smaller US companies to the third who have left for Silicon Valley, you can sort of understand why the British would be concerned. Losing fifty percent of AI resear
    • Your math may have missed the part that says "Around a third of leading machine learning and AI specialists who have left the UK’s top institutions are currently working at Silicon Valley tech firms." Brain Drain rate would be about 30%.

    • Meanwhile just one in seven have joined British start-ups.

      The 1/7 joined start up, it says nothing about those who joined big firms or university or are just plain unemployed, or are working out of their study subject ,e.g. they are now in accounting or whatever.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mikael ( 484 )

      Mostly, it's all startup's in the UK. Some are inter-university consortium's trying to solve grand challenges. Others are startups that were bought up by Google and the other big companies. A good number are analytic's companies that do data mining.

  • Oh no! Britain won't be able to have their own car that slams into concrete barriers.

    • Why don't the British build computers?

      ..

      ..

      ..

      ..

      Because they haven't figured out how to make them leak oil yet!

      • Because they haven't figured out how to make them leak oil yet!

        As long as they can still let out smoke [telus.net], they can qualify for production in the UK.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Thud457 ( 234763 )
          Seems like we always [wikipedia.org] are hearing about British brain [wikipedia.org] drains. But yeah, lets blame this on brexit and google, and not mention the illuminati reptoids.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by anegg ( 1390659 )

            Seems like we always are hearing about British brain drains. But yeah, lets blame this on brexit and google, and not mention the illuminati reptoids.

            fjords all the way down

    • You made me smile with this comment. :-) Apparently people are starting to wake up. :-)

    • TFA may be junk, but Slashdot reaction is just sad (I mean several most visible responses here with jokes about imperfect cars, Go game, general lack of brains, million monkeys, etc). Okay, AI is over-hyped, but advances with real-world value are also happening, and they become increasingly relevant for states economy and military power. And major breakthroughs like AGI are low probability but huge impact events, which states also cannot ignore.

      Also, brain drain is always something to consider; definitely

  • Bad for Britain (Score:4, Funny)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @11:40AM (#57250822) Homepage Journal
    Britain is falling behind on Go-playing technology. Pretty soon they won't be able to compete in Go-playing tournaments. Definitely more government money needs to spent on funding British AI startups.

    • Britain is falling behind on Go-playing technology.

      DeepMind is/was a British company and is still based in London, you muppet.

  • I thought big tech didn't like college.

  • Those Who Can, Do (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Those Who Can't, Stay In Britain

    God Bless the Queen!

    America is still kicking the Red Coats' asses 200+ years later

  • Lets be real, how many AI specialists do British startups really need? Tech giants that are developing sophisticated AI libraries and very rich audio, video and other data analysis software have a huge need for AI specialists, but most startups seem to just be applying those tools. Of course, some exist, but 1 in 7 sounds about right.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mikael ( 484 )

      There are startups working on autonomous vehicle driving, machine vision to do automated mapping using laser scanning, digital photography, medical diagnosis and just about anything else working with vast collections of high-resolution image data that would be impossible to do manually. They need hundreds of graduates with OpenCV experience.

  • Brexit side effect? (Score:3)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @11:47AM (#57250882)

    I am wondering if this has to do with Brexit. Sure going to America isn't much better, but Americans get an other vote in 2 more years, to change direction. Brexit on the other hand is nearly as bad, but much more difficult to stop.

    Tech firms in general are used to global collaboration, Brexit is making it more difficult for UK tech firms to do so.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The other thing is that UK wages are very low, well below other EU countries and steadily falling. For good candidates who are young and have few ties keeping them in the UK the salaries elsewhere are very attractive.

    • I am wondering if this has to do with Brexit.

      Almost certainly. The UK gets a huge slice of the EU research grant budget - far larger than its population would suggest - and the UK government has offered no replacement program yet that will provide the same amount of grants. If Brexit turns out to be a hard one I expect the numbers leaving will increase enormously.

      The UK already has some of the lowest academic salaries out there (that was why I ended up leaving since I had a family to support) and they lack tenure - it was replaced by 5-year renewa

      • it was replaced by 5-year renewable contracts.

        Only sort of. That's a conceit by the institutions but it has no basis in law. If you've been employed that long as far as the law is concerned you are a permanent employee and due all the rights of any other permanent employee no matter what the contract claims to say.

        That said academic institutions have been playing fast and loose with employment law for a long time. They are lucky that most academics have better things to do than slog through employment tri

        • as the law is concerned you are a permanent employee and due all the rights of any other permanent employee

          Being a permanent employee is nothing like tenure. Tenure grants certain immunities that permanent employees do not have. In particular, I am largely free to share my opinions and knowledge without the concern that I could get fired if this upsets someone. A permanent employee could easily get fired if they vocally disagree with company management or policy - just look at what happened to that Google engineer you refer to in your sig: right or wrong he got fired for speaking his mind which, if he were a te

          • Being a permanent employee is nothing like tenure.

            Thankyou captain obvious. I didn't say that. I said that 5 year contracts are not a thing. They can't simply fire you when the contract's over and hire someone else for the same position. Well, not legally anyway.

    • Of course it's taboo, so let's not talk about the "weather effect".
  • Blame brexit all you want, the fact is that our lords and masters in silicone valley are draining every nation in Europe and Asia, not just the UK.

  • Obviously Britain needs to build some artificial brains in order to make up for the deficit in human brainpower. Then their AI expertise will be unmatched!

  • First of all the article is subscriber only (why does Slashdot do this?) so I can't read it to answer my own question which is:

    Is there an under supply of AI specialists in Britain? If so then there is a problem but if not then it is understandable that you would look for work elsewhere...

  • "Oh bugger, it doesn't live up to the hype our marketing department laid out to the investors and customers, what do we do now? We thought it was just another design cycle and we'd have a working, saleable product by now, what do we do? The investors and stockholders will have our heads!"
    "Tut tut Nigel, we'll just invoke a version of the million monkeys theory at the problem, by recruiting every single programmer that has the term 'AI' in their resume and hope they can get us that last 0.1% we need to make

  • I think you meant to write Scottish startups.

    That said, a colleague of mine is now running his own lab on the East Coast (US) and running seminars and workgroups on AI. The water's fine, come on in.

  • The brains left a long time ago (Score:3)

    by pablo_max ( 626328 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @01:41PM (#57251566)

    Seriously, I don't know if they are all trolls or what, but you ever read the comment sections on any of the British websites that have anything remotely to do with Brexit or the EU, I would say it is clear that the brains left the UK a long time ago and the island is inhabited purely by Trump loving psychopaths.
    Some of the arguments those people make are literally retarded. I would say they have absolutely zero reasoning skills.

  • Paywalled. Summary is almost meaningless (Score:3)

    by dcooper_db9 ( 1044858 ) on Tuesday September 04, 2018 @02:41PM (#57252002)

    The article is pay-walled so we're left with what's stated in the summary. Rewritten for clarity:

    An unknown number of leading machine learning and AI specialists have left the UK's top institutions. Of that unknown number:

    • 33% are working for Silicon Valley tech firms.
    • 10% are working for other smaller US companies.
    • 10% are working for North American universities.
    • 15% are working for British start-ups.
    • 32% are unaccounted for.

    Furthermore:

    • Did they count where the jobs are or are they actually counting who they are working for? There's no brain drain if the jobs remain in the UK.
    • Exactly who is being counted as a "leading machine learning or AI specialist"?
    • How many experts have moved from the US to the UK?
  • If you wanna know why the modern H1-B visa was born, this is why. Research in the 1980s turned up the exact same thing happening at U.S. colleges and universities. A large portion of the American students were graduating, then leaving the U.S. to work in other countries. The H1-B was created to help stem this brain drain. Changes to student visas encouraged foreign students to stay in the U.S. and get a job after graduating. While the H1-B encouraged graduates from foreign universities to come work in

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