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.
... 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.
...Using public money to improve the pay of researchers would help, as would more hybrid public-private partnerships. Tougher antitrust scrutiny in technology is also needed – even if it edges toward protecting the national interest. Finally, there’s the dream of a European version of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that fosters emerging technologies for the military.
Europe’s AI and deep tech exodus will continue until its political leaders take the issue as seriously as they do jobs in the metal-bashing industries. Unless they wake up soon, the race is lost.
No comments:
Post a Comment