I’ve spent the past 4years in the deep-tech AI startup world,& I can’t recommend it highly enough.I honestly don’t know what my career would have looked like if I had chosen the straight path of joining big tech. Loving/thriving in one vs the other is personal since they differ:

First and foremost, turns out many people think an AI startup is like that new dating app that uses some sort of existing “AI” for its recommendation algorithm. And honestly, that’s not too crazy given that a majority of startups called AI startups are indeed of that kind.

However, there exists this other class of startups,called “deep-tech” that “provides technology based on overcoming substantial scientific/engineering challenges...requires lengthy research, development, and often large capital investment before successful commercialization.”

As the definition states, deep-tech startups do very much the same kind of research that happens in big tech research labs, but applied laser-focused at one or few commercial applications.

Moreover, such startups don’t necessarily prioritize publishing their work for the purpose of academic publishing itself (something that big tech labs do), but put the result of their research into real-world products that could potentially get used by real users, if successful.

Clearly, each has its own appeal. I personally truly enjoyed spending more than a year during my PhD at big tech labs. What gradually made me personally less enthusiastic about it was the whole “publishing for the sake of publishing” and “chasing citations” aspect of it all.

Things got even more and more meaningless observing all the leaderboarding craze and arXiv flag-planting games. Moreover, I could actively see how one individual barely matters at a huge company with all its existing hundreds of researchers and hundreds of ongoing projects.

To contrast the above,at a deep-tech startup you do research for the sake of ultimately building something that truly works for potentially thousands if not millions of real users(beyond beating inherently narrow benchmarks),which has always felt more rewarding & exciting to me.

Also, not being dispensable & mattering to the bottom line of an entire company is a huge distinction.When you are 1 of hundreds of thousands of employees, naturally, you are not as impactful as being 1 of 5, 20,or 100. You are more likely to leave a mark at a promising startup.

Of course, a big tech company provides a certain level of stability and comfort, which is not guaranteed at a startup. I’ve even heard friends working at big-tech calling it “a place to retire with a cushy job”,and startups are rarely cushy.

Moreover, at big tech you could have a lot of people and resources supporting you, e.g., a program manager to manage your projects, or a dedicated software engineer, etc. At a startup though, you have to actually love wearing different hats.

And then of course, big tech has name recognition, and it looks good on people's resumes. Although it sounds vain, as an immigrant myself, I know how much you'd rather people like your parents knowing the company you joined vs a seemingly random place that no one has heard of.

Of course, I’m painting the distinctions with a board brush, and there are exceptions to the above characterizations. Clearly, at the end of the day, it all boils down to personal leanings and choices.

My hope is that more people learn about the option of deep-tech AI startups. The startup world needs diverse AI people, women and POC, to join. Startups are literally the foundations of future big tech, & by building it from the ground up, we might get to build a better big-tech!