AI Fever Grips Over Google, Microsoft & Meta Employees As They Leave To Start Their Own Startups

Microsoft, Google and Meta. All these tech giants have already conducted mass layoffs in recent months in their bid to cut costs. And with spending tightened, only the most promising internal projects are getting resources in the firms.

Tech Giants' Employees Leaving For AI Startups

google

Amidst an uncertain future, internal morale of employees seems to be deteriorating, with some choosing to leave and join the artificial intelligence race.

Though all three of these tech giants have invested heavily in AI and declared it a top priority, the employees who are leaving are joining or founding startups, where they can get products to market faster and potentially see a bigger payout if they succeed.

Also Read: TCS Confirms Plan To Build Its Own ChatGPT Like AI Tool

"Bad Time For Big Tech, Great Time For Startups"

reuters

As per a Bloomberg report, Vinod Khosla, a high-profile Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist, recently said he sees a lot of former Google, Meta and Microsoft talent pitching him on new companies, particularly in AI. ¡°Bad times for big tech is a great time for startups that you'll hear about five years from now¡±, he said.

"Meta and Google are limiting resources for their ¡°most advanced projects. That will cause people to leave. And the best ones start startups because they're much more mission-driven than paycheck-driven.¡±

At the big tech firms, complaints have reportedly been heard about slowness to market for those major AI bets. Tech giant's employees are also contending with an increased focus on aligning what¡¯s in production to already-successful products and business lines, like YouTube at Google and advertising at Meta. That¡¯s a divergence from the investment in more random experimentation that their cultures allowed before all the belt-tightening. A Meta manager reportedly said that since the first round of layoffs, employees have been encouraging each other to go pursue outside ambitions, rather than stay for the next round of job cuts.

Also Read: Why Apple & Google CEOs Fight To Hire & Retain Two IITians

Some Employees Already Started/Working In AI Startups

indiatimes

Already, some standout AI companies are associated with former Googlers. Character AI, which allows people to hold realistic chatbot conversations with familiar personalities, is founded by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who did pioneering work on the neural language model LaMDA at Google.

Cohere, which makes it easier to use large language models, and Adept, a machine learning research and product lab, were also started by ex-Googlers ¡ª people who, alongside Shazeer, worked on one of the landmark AI papers out of Google research, entitled

In recent years, many high-level Meta employees decamped to start or join crypto companies, which didn¡¯t turn out to be as lucrative as expected (yet). Either way, ¡°there¡¯s almost no example of very large innovation coming from an existing large entity,¡± he said. ¡°This entrepreneurial ecosystem is essential for progress.

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