UK Edition
Britain faces an AI brain drain as tech giants raid top universities
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.
The Telegraph surveyed 150 people who had gained either a postgraduate-level degree or had held research positions at Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, UCL and Oxford Brookes universities.
It comes amid growing anxiety over big technology’s ability to lure professors and graduates with higher salary offers.
Many are offered six-figure starting salaries to take their scarce expertise to the United States.
Recent cases in which leading UK names in machine learning have been swept up have included Cambridge information engineering professor Zoubin Ghahramani, who became Uber’s chief scientist, and Sheffield machine learning professor Neil Lawrence, who was chosen by Amazon to lead its machine learning team from Cambridge.
Renato Salas-Moreno, whose own British start-up was bought by Facebook in 2014, said smaller business can struggle to attract talent when competing with US tech giants: “Big tech companies have hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for top talent and it’s difficult for start-ups to compete.”
The latest research comes just months after the Government launched its £1bn sector deal for AI, in which it pledged, among other things, to invest £17m to fund artificial intelligence development in British universities, in a bid to “seize the £232bn opportunity AI offers the UK economy by 2030”.
Sam Gyimah, the Science Minister said: “The UK is one of the world’s leading technology nations and is recognised as a place where ingenuity and entrepreneurship can flourish.
“We are a beacon for global talent, and as part of our modern industrial strategy – through our £1bn AI sector deal – we are capitalising on the UK’s global advantage in artificial intelligence.”
Silicon Valley behemoths, including Facebook, Google and Apple, have all been investing heavily in artificial intelligence, with McKinsey estimating that globally tech giants spent between $20bn (£15bn) and $30bn on artificial intelligence in 2016 alone.
Facebook’s top AI scientist Yann Lecun, in July said AI had become “so central to the operations of companies like ours, that what our leadership has been telling us is: ‘Go faster. You’re not going fast enough’.”
Tech UK’s head of policy Vinous Ali said: “From our perspective it’s no bad thing that Brits will be going abroad and that we’re attracting talent here. I think that just creates a better environment for innovation.
“Tech talent is incredibly mobile and you see a lot of big moves happening between the US and the UK, and other world leading centres, and creating that mix and that mobility allows people to innovate,” she added.