After joining OpenAI, the father of BERT, Jacob Devlin, returned to the Bard project!

Organize | Zhu Kexin

Produced | CSDN Program Life (ID: coder_life)

The battle for GPT is, in the final analysis, also a war of talents.

After ChatGPT became a blockbuster and became popular, many old Google heroes "defected".

It was previously reported that OpenAI has poached at least a dozen AI experts from Google in recent months, including Jacob Devlin, the father of BERT and a top AI researcher.

Now the story has been reversed, and according to The Information, Jacob Devlin is now back to his job.

Protesting Bard's "plagiarism" to no avail, he jumped to OpenAI

In fact, Jacob Devlin's departure from Google is no child's play.

In March, Google was revealed to have "made a big taboo" - the Bard team was using information from ShareGPT to train.

ShareGPT is a Chrome extension co-created by Steven Tey and Dom Eccleston last December to capture and share people's conversations in ChatGPT.

According to OpenAI's user protocol, the results of ChatGPT training cannot be used commercially.

Obviously, Google's operation violated the regulations, and for a while, it caused many insiders to express dissatisfaction.

All this was also an important trigger for Jacob Devlin's departure.

According to The Information, Jacob Devlin has internally warned Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other executives that this behavior violates OpenAI's terms of service and will make Bard's answer very similar to ChatGPT.

On March 30, Amir Efrati, executive editor of The Information, tweeted that Jacob Devlin had chosen to leave Google after the warning.

Worked for Google for 5 years and returned after 3 months of leaving

The mention of Jacob Devlin is a thunderous sight in the tech world. Previously, Jacob Devlin worked as a software engineer at Microsoft for more than 3 years, and he has joined Google for 5 years since he "graduated" from Microsoft in 2017. At Google, Jacob Devlin is responsible for developing fast, powerful, and scalable deep learning models for information retrieval, question answering, and other language understanding tasks. In addition, Jacob Devlin is the lead author of Google's 2018 paper on the BERT model, "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding." As reported earlier by Business Insider and The Information, this research paper on training machine learning models to improve search accuracy helped spark an AI craze. In a way, this research has become part of the language model of Google and OpenAI.

At present, according to Jacob Deflin's "work experience" on Linkedin, it does not show that Jacob Devlin briefly stayed in OpenAI for 3 months. The reason for his return to Google has not been officially disclosed. However, people familiar with the matter said that Jacob Devlin will work closely with Bard's main developer Slav Petrov after his return.

OpenAI "poaching", AI talent competition is fierce

It's worth mentioning that it's not just Jacob Devlin who has joined OpenAI.

Last November, OpenAI's official ChatGPT blog post featured several former Google employees: Barret Zoph, Liam Fedus, Luke Metz, Jacob Menick, Rapha Gontijo Lope.

In February this year, former Google employees Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chuang "joined" OpenAI after announcing their departure.

A large number of "talent migration" can't help but make netizens ridicule: "OpenAI's killer is a former Google engineer!" ”

Needless to say, whether it is Jacob Devlin's return to his old club or OpenAI's "poaching", it is not difficult to see that the battle for AI talent is becoming increasingly fierce.

Earlier, it was reported that Silicon Valley giants were using "salaries" to recruit:

• Google has offered an annual salary of 174,000 to 276,000 US dollars (about 1.25 million to 1.99 million yuan) for the position of senior software engineer of large language models;
• Microsoft's salary range for related positions can reach 133,000 to 256,000 US dollars (about 960,000 to 1.85 million yuan) per year.

In China, bigwigs and headhunters are also "throwing a lot of money" at AI talents.

In mid-February, former Meituan number two figure Wang Huiwen released a "hero post", announcing that he personally invested $50 million to recruit AI talents to create a Chinese version of Open AI, and clearly stated that he hoped to recruit "industry-recognized top R&D talents."

In addition, "headhunting" on major recruitment websites has also set off a "recruitment wave" of AI talents. A search for keywords such as "AIGC" on Liepin can find that companies such as ByteDance, Baidu, and Hao Future have significant demand for positions such as "algorithm engineer" and "AIGC application expert", with a monthly salary of up to 80,000.

As high salaries attract talent, AI's employment prospects are also broader. According to the "ChatGPT Related Field Employment Insight Report" launched by Liepin Big Data Research Institute, in the fourth quarter of 2022, the number of new AI jobs was 2.74 times that in the first quarter of 2018. From the perspective of salary, in 2022, the average annual salary of artificial intelligence recruitment will be 331,500 yuan.

Seeing Jacob Devlin enter Google for the second time, it also triggered discussions among netizens on topics such as AI talent job-hopping and high-paying "poaching" of technology companies.

Many netizens said: "Google must have opened a higher salary, sure enough, AI is a gold-absorbing industry", "Choosing the right industry is not worrying about unemployment"... Some netizens said: "Looking forward to Jacob Devlin's big move, don't let OpenAI win alone", "Sit and wait for a blockbuster update from Bard"...

So, what do you think of Jacob Deflin's return?

Reference Links:

https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1672284772721209344

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ai-boomerang-googles-internal-critic-returns-from-rival-openai

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-devlin-135ab048/