Response from Yann LeCun (https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155263530987143 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155263530987143) Facebook AI

Response from Yann LeCun (https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155263530987143 https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10155263530987143) Facebook AI Research is opening two new labs in Seattle and Pittsburgh, which will join the existing sites in Menlo Park, New York, Paris, Montréal, and Tel Aviv. We are delighted to welcome Luke Zettlemoyer to the Seattle lab and Abhinav Gupta and Jessica Hodgins to the Pittsburgh lab. Luke will retain his faculty position at the University of Washington, and Abhinav and Jessica their positions at Carnegie Mellon University on a part-time basis. Many FAIR researchers share their time between FAIR and a university: Lior Wolf (Tel Aviv University), Jitendra Malik (UC Berkeley), Joelle Pineau (McGill), Pascal Vincent (U Montréal), Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra (Georgia Tech), Iasonas Kokkinos (UCL), Rob Fergus, Kyunghyun Cho and myself (NYU). All of us teach classes, advise graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and participate in the life of our academic departments. Our time is split 80/20, 50/50 or 20/80. Additionally, Full-time FAIR researchers have affiliations with universities that allow them to advise PhD students. Examples include Leon Bottou and Jason Weston who are both affiliated with NYU. Our Paris lab hosts over 15 resident PhD students who are co-advised by a FAIR researcher and an academic advisor. Those of us who come from academia continue to educate the next generation of researchers and engineers. This is made possible by the fact that we practice open research at FAIR, which makes it easy to collaborate with academic groups. This new modus operandi is redefining the relationship between academic research and industry research. Professors gain a different type of experience in industry that can have a positive impact on their students and on their research. Additionally, their connection with industry helps produce new scientific advances that may be difficult to achieve in an academic environment, and helps turn those advances into practical technology. Universities are familiar with the concept of faculty with part-time appointments in industry. It is common in medicine, law and business. This NYT piece by Cade Metz erroneously qualifies this evolution as a "brain drain" from academia. But Facebook is careful not to deplete universities from their best faculty, by making it easy to maintain sizeable research and teaching activities in their academic labs. In fact, making these part-time splits possible is precisely the reason why we have been establishing labs in New York, Paris, Montréal, Tel Aviv, and now Seattle and Pittsburgh. It is the proximity to leading universities with talented faculty, and the existence of a local talent pool that attract us. Unlike others, we work with universities to find suitable arrangements and do not hire away large numbers of faculty into full-time positions bottled up behind a wall of non-disclosure agreements. We contribute to local ecosystem. Faculty who join FAIR part-time practice open research, teach courses, advise PhD students, and participate in the life of their department.