MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA -- In a move that is completely unsurprising to many, Google's AI research division has announced that they are issuing PhD degrees to select employees. Industry research organizations like Google Brain, DeepMind, and FAIR are well known as heavy hitters in the artificial intelligence research community, publishing as many papers (if not more) as academic institutions like Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT. Many top professors from academia have migrated over to industry research labs as well, sacrificing the security of academic tenure for fat stacks of money. Although Google has previously experimented with research residencies, this is the first time that they have issued postgraduate degrees. According to a representative, the tech giant decided to issue PhDs in order to attract scarce AI talent.