Google and Facebook Are Sucking the Brains Out of Europe
Last week, the FT reported that a group of Britain’s best-known quantum computing scientists had moved quietly to Silicon Valley to found a startup called PsiQ. The lure was the abundance of venture capital that can’t be had in Europe.
The American VC firm Playground, set up by Android’s founder Andy Rubin, has invested in the new company. Judging by Playground’s track record – two of its most notable successes were sold to Amazon.com Inc. – PsiQ may very well end up becoming part of Big Tech’s trophy collection one day.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Europe’s smartest and most promising tech startups have been gobbled up by the behemoths of Silicon Valley and Seattle. Britain’s DeepMind (an artificial intelligence specialist), France’s Moodstocks (a machine learning developer for image recognition) and Germany’s Fayteq (which lets you remove objects from videos) were all bought by Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
With every one of these sales, Europe loses ground in the global race for talent. Some 562 European startups were bought by U.S. firms between 2012 and 2016, or 44% of the total, according to the advisory firm Mind the Bridge. As the Google economist Hal Varian says, a big reason for buying these companies is being able to poach all of their engineers in one go.
To get a sense of how scarce these resources are, consider that the international talent pool for AI – the “defining technology of our times,” according to Microsoft’s CEO – is alarmingly shallow at about 205,000 people. Germany and Britain are among the top-five hubs for AI talent because of the excellence of their universities. But it’s a bitter struggle to keep such highly prized workers at home.
The primary concern about this brain drain isn’t national pride or flag-waving; it is power. It’s about who controls the huge and politically sensitive data sets on which AI relies.
Google’s takeover of DeepMind is a fascinating example.
