[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.