Just down the block, inside a stone building of its own, Microsoft is designing some sort of computer chip for artificial intelligence.

"It remains one of the huge competitive advantages that you can get the same, or better, talent for cheaper and less churn," said Matt Clifford, a co-founder of Entrepreneur First, a start-up incubator in London that recruits students from Cambridge and Oxford. Entrepreneur First helped create Magic Pony, yet another A.I. company, which Twitter acquired for $150 million in 2016. But some wonder whether these companies could better serve Britain by staying independent. Ian Hogarth trained as a machine learning researcher at Cambridge, founded the live music app Songkick and is now an angel investor in Britain. He argued that if DeepMind had remained an independent, it may have grown into the country's first tech superpower. Following a similar path were start-ups like VocalIQ (acquired by Apple) and Evi, the company that Amazon acquired in 2013 as part of its effort to build the Alexa digital assistant.