- A wave of new startups former Google AI experts have launched hit the scene in 2022.
- They’ve collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars and are build next-generation AI tools.
- Here are 26 former Google employees who left in roughly the last year, identified by Insider.
Buzzy new AI tools like DALL-E 2 and the recently-released ChatGPT are making it clear that the AI field is evolving at a blistering pace — and it only seems to be accelerating.
OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT, is among several companies producing such tools, including Facebook, Google, Hugging Face, and Stability AI. The companies build these tools on the principle of large-language models, and much of the progress that made them possible goes back to a breakthrough paper Google AI researchers released in 2017. Titled “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper outlined a technique called Transformers that went on to become the go-to methodology for powering modern AI tools.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that Google is the source of a vast pool of talent that specializes in machine learning. The writers of the Transformers paper in particular have gone on to launch their own startups that are pushing the bounds of machine learning. Others have landed at OpenAI, but a good portion coalesced around emerging AI startups.
Former Google employees founded Adept AI this year, for example, and went on to raise $65 million from investors like Addition and Greylock. The startup is focused on building a kind of task-completion bot based on the same underlying technology as text-generation tools. Its CEO, CTO, and chief scientist all came over from Google.
There’s also Inflection AI, a much more secretive company in the large-language-model space, which raised $225 million in May and counts Mustafa Suleyman among its founders. Suleyman was a founding member of the AI lab DeepMind and went on to become Google’s vice president of AI products and policy in 2020, six years after Google acquired DeepMind. At least four other Google AI employees joined Inflection AI this year.
Character.ai is another startup the author of a seminal paper in AI founded. Its product gives users a way to talk to bots that have been trained to respond as famous figures, such as Socrates.
Insider identified 26 former Google AI researchers and employees who left the tech giant for machine-learning startups in roughly the past year:
- David Luan: Formerly of Google Brain, Luan was a tech lead for Google’s large-language-model efforts. Luan is now the CEO of Adept AI.
- Anmol Gulati: A former senior researcher at Google Brain, Gulati conducted research focused on speech recognition. Gulati is now a member of the founding team of Adept AI.
- Ashish Vaswani: One of the writers of the seminal paper on Transformers, which is one of the most widely-adopted modern AI techniques. Vaswani is now the chief scientist of Adept AI.
- Erich Elsen: A former researcher at DeepMind, Elsen is now a member of the founding team of Adept AI.
- Niki Parmar: One of the writers of the Transformers paper and a former Google Brain researcher. Parmar is now the chief technology officer at Adept AI.
- Kelsey Szot: A former lead-product manager for distributed training and large-model production. Szot is now a member of the founding team of Adept AI.
- Noam Shazeer: One of the writers of the Transformers paper and a principle software engineer at Google. Shazeer is now the CEO of Character.AI.
- Irwan Bello: A former research scientist on the Google Brain team, Bello is now a member of the founding team of Character.ai.
- Prajit Ramachandran: A former research scientist at Google Brain, Ramachandran is now a founding researcher of Character.AI.
- Romal Thoppilan: One of the authors of the LaMDA paper — Google’s chat bot — Thoppilan is now a founding researcher at Character.ai.
- Daniel De Freitas: One of the authors of the LaMDA paper, De Freitas is now the president of Character.AI.
- Eric Jang: A former senior research scientist at Google, Jang is now VP of AI at Halodi Robotics.
- Mustafa Suleyman: A former cofounder of DeepMind, Suleyman is now the CEO and a cofounder of Inflection AI.
- Karen Simonyan: A former principle-research scientist at DeepMind, Simonyan is now a cofounder and the chief scientist at Inflection AI.
- Rewon Child: Formerly a researcher at Google Brain, Child is now a member of the technical staff at Inflection AI.
- Maarten Bosma: A former research engineer at Google Brain that worked on its large-language model PaLM, Bosma is now a member of the technical staff of Inflection AI.
- Joe Fenton: A former senior product manager at Google working on LaMDA, Fenton is now a member of the founding team of Inflection AI.
- Tatiana Shpeisman: A former senior engineering manager at Google who worked on CPU and GPU compilers, Shpeisman is now the compiler-engineering director at Modular.
- Martin Schmid: A former senior research scientist at DeepMind and a co-author of DeepStack and Player of Games — an AI built for competitive games like poker — Schmid is now the CEO and a cofounder of EquiLibre Technologies.
- Matej Moravcik: A former researcher at DeepMind and a co-author of DeepStack, Moravcik is now the CSO and a cofounder of EquiLibre Technologies.
- Rudolf Kadlec: A former senior research developer at DeepMind and a co-author of Player of Games. Kadlec isthe CTO and a cofounder of EquiLibre Technologies.
- Jack Rae: A former senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, Rae is now a member of the technical staff at OpenAI.
- Maithra Raghu: A former senior research scientist at Google, Raghu is now a cofounder and the CEO of Samaya AI.
- Alex Hanna: A former senior research scientist for ethical AI at Google, Hanna is now the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute.
- Barret Zoph: A former staff research scientist at Google Brain, Zoph is now member of technical staff at OpenAI.
- Sara Hooker: A former research scientist at Google Brain, Hooker is now leading Cohere For AI, a nonprofit machine-learning research lab.
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