[T-A]

> remind me what's wrong with working with the Americans again?

Make that American companies and the problem, from an academic perspective, is that they recruit away students and researchers from academia. That works for a few years, but longer term, the argument goes, it depletes academia to the point that new talent can no longer be trained... by academia.

At that point, the companies wishing to keep recruiting will create their own training facilities and/or step up collaboration with academic institutions. That's where the American part comes in: if the existing talent has all gone to the US and those making the decisions have been there all along, they are likely to focus their training efforts on the US.

On top of that, you have the well-publicized problems with data collection by foreign entities and local tax avoidance, which are indeed political.

[peoplewindow]

You make it sound like a zero sum game. If academics are being hired into industry, that frees up grant money to be spent on other areas where they aren't recruiting so aggressively. It doesn't actually 'deplete' academia except in the short run, unless the supply of students who want to do research becomes fully tapped out.

Also, people who are trained already can always go into academia or return to Europe. These movements aren't permanent by nature.

[T-A]

> If academics are being hired into industry, that frees up grant money to be spent on other areas

That's great for those other areas, but the open letter in question is about machine learning.

> It doesn't actually 'deplete' academia except in the short run, unless the supply of students who want to do research becomes fully tapped out.

... or the very limited supply of established researchers who can train them is tapped out. Also, "fully tapped out" is a squishy notion; you can always lower your recruitment standards, with obvious consequences.

But there is no need to get into hypotheticals here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/nov/02/big-tech-fir...

> people who are trained already can always go into academia or return to Europe

But why would they want to? They chose to move away for a reason, so something would have to change for them to change their mind. What would that be?

The authors of the open letter seem to think that a European AI hub could be that thing.

[gaius]

Academics consider anyone who has worked in industry “tainted”, such a person would never make it to tenure, even if they wanted to

Tenure is about the only carrot academia has to dangle

[DanielleMolloy]

I don't see that in computer science, or in my subarea of research. Major industry labs are highly respected contributors to science, and this has a long tradition with Xerox PARC and Bell labs, and now with Microsoft Research, Google Research and DeepMind (to name few among many).

[tnecniv]

That's not true. I knew a lot of professors at my undergrad, which is a well-known university, that worked in industrial research positions after their PhD before returning to academia.