It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and peop

It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers. Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.