Tech giants are fighting to hire the best AI talent at the NIPS conference in LA this week

Chris Bishop is the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge. The global war for artificial intelligence (AI) talent is raging, with tech giants fighting it out to hire the brightest minds in the field and use them to take their platforms into unchartered waters. There's currently a shortage of people with the skills and experience needed to make breakthroughs in machine learning, a field of computer science that gives machines the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Fortunately, many of the top minds in the field are going to be concentrated in one place this week when they descend on a conference in Long Beach, California, called NIPS, which stands for neural information processing systems. Google, Microsoft, DeepMind, Facebook, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Apple, and Open AI (Elon Musk's AI research lab) will all be at NIPS presenting their latest research and looking to hire people from rival firms, as well as PhD students fresh out of universities like Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial.