[NipunSingh]

A lot of the people featured in this story came from Microsoft. Folks at Microsoft/Facebook - any ideas as to why that is? Is it just that Microsoft is a huge and dominant institution in computing so probability wise a lot of people naturally would have backgrounds which came from Microsoft? Is it because Microsoft is (or were??) leaders in ML/AI and it is has recently become a FB focus area, so lots of hiring of Microsoft talent?

[deepnotderp]

MSR let go of one of their major AI/ML groups IIRC and they promptly joined FAIR, plus Kaiming He and his group (one of the best) left for FAIR.

[mcphilip]

The article seems to posit that Facebook is structured in a way to much more quickly implement advances in the field into production than Microsoft. Microsoft attracted a lot of talent in the area but said talent gravitates towards whichever company is best suited to use their skills.

[aussie123]

I think its similar in other areas, like storage... Lots of former Microsoft people at FB. Wondering how that impacted their culture, etc. over the last 3-5 years. They just recently opened a brand new office in Seattle also AFAIK.

[bonniemuffin]

Microsoft has like 100,000+ employees, so it's possible that a non-negligible fraction of all tech employees have worked at MSFT at some point.