recently,MetaThe FAIR team has once again welcomed the departure of a top research scientist. Ross Girshick, the author of R-CNN, has decided to leave Meta and join the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). This is also the latest in a series of resignations within the FAIR team.up to dateDevelopment. Previously, Xie Saining, the first author of ResNeXt, left to join New York University, and some other research scientists left, causing FAIR to lose some important talents in the field of computer vision. At the same time, He Kaiming and Xie Saining and others announced their return to academia, and will join MIT and New York University as faculty in 2024 respectively. This series of moves has triggered discussions about the current status and future of Meta in the field of AI.
Yann LeCun, chief scientist of Meta, expressed his understanding and blessing for these resignations. He believes that it is a natural career transition for scientists to switch from industrial laboratories to academia or non-profit organizations. LeCun also mentioned that a similar situation had occurred at Bell Labs, where scientists chose to leave after 5 to 10 years to seek tenured positions at universities. This transition is possible at FAIR because FAIR has an open research policy that encourages scientists to publish papers. This flexibility means that after starting their careers at FAIR, scientists can turn to academia without taking too much risk and inject new vitality into their careers.
However, Meta still faces challenges in retaining talent. Although Meta has made some progress in the open source field, such as the release of large models such as Llama and Llama2, the departure of big names has raised questions about Meta's competitiveness and innovation in the field of AI. The reason for Ross Girshick's departure is not clear, but he has made significant contributions in his career at Meta FAIR, including the development of the R-CNN object detection method and participation in many popular research such as Fast R-CNN and Mask R-CNN. His influence and contribution in the field of computer vision cannot be ignored, so his departure may affect Meta's research direction and innovation in this field.
Ultimately, talent mobility is the norm in the field of scientific research, and people have different priorities at different stages of their careers. For Meta, losing some big names may be a temporary loss, but it is also a constant reminder that they need to work harder to retain talent. In the future, AI2 will welcome Ross Girshick to join, and we look forward to him bringing more surprises and innovations in new areas. This series of turmoil has also made the industry pay attention to Meta's development in the field of AI, in the hope of seeing them make more progress in talent retention and innovation.