Facebook hires Microsoft researchers to expand its artificial intelligence team

Facebook today announced that it’s made several key additions to the growing Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) team.

The headcount in the lab’s California and New York offices now exceeds 40, Yann LeCun, the head of the lab and a prominent figure in a trendy type of AI called deep learning, wrote in a blog post.

Two of the hires announced today, Léon Bottou and Anitha Kannan, come from Microsoft Research, a major force in technology research and development and one that includes a good supply of AI talent. One person, Michael Auli, actually finished his postdoctoral work at Microsoft Research, and Facebook was nevertheless able to lure him over to the social networking giant. Two, Laurens van der Maaten and Nicolas Usunier, were previously professors at European universities.

All of this hiring activity in AI isn’t surprising given the considerable amount of money Facebook has been allocating for research and development.

Major tech companies have been racing to bring on experts in deep learning. Snapchat recently established a research team that will be doing deep learning on content such as images. But Facebook, of course, is at a much greater scale.