How the ‘big 5’ bolstered their AI through acquisitions in 2019

The AI talent grab is real. This year alone, Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski jumped ship to Airbnb, while Pinterest hired Walmart CTO Jeremy King to head up its engineering team. Moreover, all the big tech companies, including Google and Apple, have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions — a recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple with 20 acquisitions. Elsewhere, Microsoft turned to online education platforms to help train a new generation of AI students. But while the AI talent pool may be growing, a significant shortage remains. Those with the necessary skills — ranging from robotics to computer vision and natural language processing — are in high demand, and they face a clear choice: Take a paycheck at one of the big tech companies, chase a longer-term moonshot at an emerging startup, or launch their own business from scratch.