Several Respected AI Scientists Left Meta Platforms This Year – Report
2022.04.01 13:59
Several Respected AI Scientists Left Meta Platforms (FB) This Year – Report
Several artificial intelligence (AI) scientists left Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:FB) this year following the company’s pivot toward the metaverse.
CNBC reports that at least four respected Meta AI members have exited the company over recent months, including scientists that have published numerous academic studies and achieved multiple breakthroughs during their time at Meta, formerly known as Facebook .
Karl Hermann, CEO of Saiga and former senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, said the actual number of members who departed Meta could be half a dozen after a number of scientists left the company’s AI lab in London.
“Meta’s London office just collapsed and they lost most of their [top] researchers in the span of six weeks,” he told CNBC.
“Marks [Zuckerberg] gone all Meta now … and they never invested properly in anything in London in the first place,” said Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, adding the departures were no surprise.
According to the report, the prominent researchers who left Meta’s AI team include Edward Grefenstette, a scientist who was head of the reinforcement learning branch at the company.
Heinrich Kuttler, who worked as a research engineering manager at Meta, recently left the company to join the AI startup Inflection AI, founded by DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and billionaire Reid Hoffman.
Other departures include research scientists Ahmad Beirami and Douwe Kiela. Beirami now serves the same role at Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), while Kiela became the head of research at AI startup Hugging Face.
CNBC reports that more Meta AI members have left or plan to depart the company in the following weeks, adding there is no particular reason behind the departures.
Some people jump to another big lab because they feel it will advance their career or research agenda better, the report said.
By Senad Karaahmetovic
