alt Hacker News>The best fresh graduates from the top colleges went to Google and Facebook in the last decade -- because they paid significantly more -- and Microsoft picked up the rest.
That seems shaky as a justification. I don’t have any data behind it, but in a world of eight billion people, it’s a hard sell that there’s only enough top talent for 3 companies.
Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately. Google might be a better sell with alphafold and some other projects but none of it seems mainstream tech either.
Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
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Small startups will always excel in talent density because of the increase risk (and reward) and alignment along equity, but all of the large companies have enough technically brilliant people. Many in their 30s or 40s want to do excellent work and also have stability to provide for their families. Whether management gets out of their way is another question.
A few projects just in ML: DeepMind has plenty enough for Google alone but Jax and the TPU project are technically ambitious and very strategically important for Google; they hired Adam Paszke away from Meta. Besides Gemini they have Gemma and Veo and they have a reputation in the industry of having extremely high MFU averages. From Facebook there's PyTorch but that's a whole cluster of projects (compiler, abstractions for many accelerators, torchao, torchtitan). They're also famous for DINO and SAM models, as well as many others by FAIR (e.g. Mask R-CNN).
>I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately
I was pleasantly surprised by Llama.
> Plus, feel free to correct me but I don’t feel Meta has brought anything technically brilliant to the table lately
PyTorch?
> Maybe pixels if you want to stretch it, but search, maps, Gmail, YouTube, android, and even photos were there a decade ago already.
I don't disagree really, in the end all three suck: G, MS, FB. Google did in fact hire all the top talent but only to make sure they don't work on something good for someone else.
I hear you, I might give people the benefit of the doubt too much, but I interpreted what he said more like while Facebook and Google were going out of their way to make sure they hired only the best, hiring was just not a point of emphasis for Microsoft and as a result it didn’t hire as many good people
I think that point is fair - at the very least, Microsoft wasn’t in the conversation as far as where the typical CS grad wanted to work - FANG doesn’t even include Microsoft in the acronym (I kid, I realize this doesn’t actually mean anything)
You often don’t see what Google and Meta bring to the table because they aren’t trying to sell you products, they’re trying to glue your eyeballs to your screen and they’ve done extremely well at that.