Comment by dmix

1 day ago

The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.

Not to mention UK is arguably further down the mass surveillance pipeline than the US. They’ve always had more aggressive domestic intelligence surveillance laws which was made clear during the Snowden years, they’ve had flock style cameras forever, and they have an anti encryption law pitched seemingly yearly.

I’d imagine most top engineers would rather try to push back on the US executive branch overreach than move. At least for the time being.

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dmix

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EdNutting  1 day ago

For sure we’re not currently attracting the talent. There’s more to that than just money, but money is significant factor. When it comes to compensation, AI is too broad a category to have a meaningful debate. Hardware or software or mathematics or what kind of person? Etc.

I’m not gonna dispute the UK being further down some parts of the road.

Not sure what you’d count as top engineers, but I know enough that have been asking about and moving to the UK/EU that it’s been a noticeable reversal of the historic trends. Also, a major slowdown of these kinds of people in the UK/EU wanting to move to the US.

graemep  20 hours ago

Google's Deepmind is UK based.

It is American owned now but it clearly hired enough talent for Google to buy it.

reaperducer  1 day ago

The EU and UK is a long way from attracting top AI talent purely from opportunity and monetary terms.

Which is why people are talking about this -- it's about ideology now.

You may personally be motivated solely by money. Not everybody is you.

  • dmix  1 day ago

    I’m not an AI engineer but it’s not hard to imagine why some bright talent would want to work at the most exciting AI companies in the US while also making 3-10x what they’d make in Europe.

    Ideology is easy to throw around for internet comments but working on the cutting edge stuff next to the brightest minds in the space will always be a major personal draw. Just look at the Manhattan project, I doubt the primary draw for all of those academics was getting to work on a bomb. It was the science, huge funding, and interpersonal company.

    • EdNutting  1 day ago

      See my other comments around here. This idea that salaries in the US are so much higher than Europe for all these top AI roles just isn’t true. Even the big American companies have been opening offices in places like London to hire the top talent at high salaries.

      This also isn’t hypothetical. I know top-talent engineers and researchers that have moved out of the USA in the last 12 months due to the political climate (which goes beyond just the AI topics).

      And you might want to read a few books on the Manhattan project and the people involved before you use that analogy. I don’t think it’s particularly strong.

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