We have mentioned the name of Facebook’s chief AI Scientist Yann Lecun in previous blogs. He won the Turing Prize for his research in 2018. He is a deep learning pioneer. He received a job offer from Google –Director of Research. He turned down this offer on account of several reasons, of which one was the compensation package. Of course, the stock option package was attractive. He was concerned about the size of the company — it had 600 employees and no revenue at that time. It meant the job would go beyond research, say corporate strategy and operational management. LeCun wanted to refocus on ML. Had he taken the Google assignment, he would have made the organization a bit more open and a bit more ambitions a bit earlier. Google was considered a bit slow and cautions by critics with its AI development. Google responded to OpenAI’s ChatGPT by releasing competing products.