Google Boosts Artificial Intel Effort By Hiring Two Leading Experts: And Both Are Asian Women

Talent is where you find it, not where your predispositions lie. JL

Richard Waters reports in the Financial Times:

The  hires include Jia Li, who has been head of research at Snapchat and Fei-Fei Li, director of the AI lab at Stanford University’s computer science department. The two will lead machine learning for Google’s, boosting the company’s attempt to make up lost ground on Amazon and Microsoft. The appointments were announced by Diane Greene, the board member of Google parent Alphabet who was appointed last year to relaunch Google’s cloud business.
Google has hired two of the most prominent women working in artificial intelligence research, adding to a brain-drain that has already seen many of the top minds in the field drawn into a handful of the biggest technology companies.
The latest hires include Jia Li, who has been head of research at Snapchat for less than two years, making her a key figure in that company’s efforts to harness machine vision and augmented reality to enhance its messaging service.
Google has also recruited Fei-Fei Li, director of the AI lab at Stanford University’s computer science department.
The two will lead machine learning for Google’s cloud computing division, boosting the company’s attempt to make up lost ground on Amazon and Microsoft.
The appointments were announced on Tuesday by Diane Greene, the board member of Google parent Alphabet who was appointed last year to relaunch Google’s cloud business. She has focused much of her effort on taking advanced data analytics developed for Google’s core internet services and making the same tools available to corporate and government customers through the cloud.
The new cloud AI hires follow a spate of recruiting as Google has sought to boost its research capabilities and push machine learning into all of its products. Along with Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, it has been competing aggressively for the limited group of experienced researchers in a field now seen as core to large parts of the companies’ business.
Among top researchers drawn to Google are Geoff Hinton, a British-born scientist who is regarded as one of the pioneers of deep learning; the founders of DeepMind, the UK-based deep learning company that has made a series of breakthroughs in the field; and John Giannandrea, another British-born researcher who came to Google through an acquisition and is now head of search.