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Britain Faces an AI Brain Drain as Tech Giants Raid Top Universities (telegraph.co.uk)
British outlet The Telegraph reports: Britain faces an artificial intelligence "brain drain" as Silicon Valley raids its top universities for talent, data compiled by The Telegraph shows. Around a third of leading machine learning and AI specialists who have left the UK's top institutions are currently working at Silicon Valley tech firms. More than a tenth have moved to North American universities and nearly a tenth are currently working for other smaller US companies. Meanwhile just one in seven have joined British start-ups.
No one wants to pay for services online because they've become attached to "free" and yet all of these services and content still require resources to produce, so the ad model is one of the few approaches that work. Others (such as using your CPU to mine cryptocurrencies or a patronage model) have their own issues or don't scale well to large organizations.
So the natural demand is to figure out how to deliver ads to get a better return on them because the companies that advertise would like to spend less money on them and the companies that place the ads would like to get more people to click on them. Whether or not you think this looks stupid from the outside is irrelevant. Unless you're willing to pay AI researchers more money in order to do something else, they're going to go after the best paying jobs that they can get.