No, Chris Jones started working for Meta in
June 2022, see my post and his LinkedIn profile.
That’s exactly why I wrote the following:
But has there ever been any indication that Meta was indeed an EAP customer at the time? Any announcement as with other EAP customers? If not, we shouldn’t simply assume so.
But for the sake of the discussion, let’s assume for a minute it was indeed the case.
In practice, the overlapping period regarding Chris Jones working for Meta and his introduction to BrainChip and TENNs would have been much shorter, though, given that Chris Jones said
on May 23, 2024
“So, about a year ago, uh, I was at Meta, I was in their AI Infrastructure Group, and on an almost daily basis I would see new neural network architectures.
So, when I was introduced to BrainChip, I didn’t think I would really be impressed by anything a small team was gonna develop, erm. They told me about TENNs, I was a little bit skeptical to be honest at first. As I started getting to understand the benchmarks and a little bit more of the math and how it worked, I started to get pretty excited by what they had.”
Saying “about a year ago” on May 23, 2024 could mean July, June, May, April, possibly even March 2023. He certainly wouldn’t have put it that way if he and his colleagues had already been introduced to BrainChip in let’s say October 2022. And since he appears to have been laid off in mid-April, the potential time window shrinks to a maximum of six weeks, I’d say. That’s far from the nine months you claimed.
Your use of the participle “outplaced” instead of “laid off” implies that Meta would have helped him to find his current job? Again, there is no indication of that at all when you read his LinkedIn post, especially the last paragraph:
View attachment 65061
Mind you, I did not say there is no way that Chris Jones could have found out about TENNs while still working for Meta, but to me his words are certainly not conclusive evidence, the way FF presented them. They can very well be interpreted differently, especially with the background knowledge that he was laid off more than a year ago (which he didn’t mention in the video). I had already taken notice of that a while ago, when I had had a look at his LinkedIn profile after learning that he would be the one giving the talk Nandan Nayampally was supposed to have presented. (This was even before we found out from the Quarterly Investor podcast that Nandan and Rob had all of a sudden left the company.)
So no, mine is not a tendentious reading and I am not shooting myself in the foot either, if that is what you meant to say. My argument is well-founded. I don’t exclude the possibility that Chris Jones got introduced to BrainChip while still working for Meta, but I believe it is the unlikelier sequence of events for the reasons stated.
Also: Why would he have asked his LinkedIn network for assistance in finding a new job in his April 2023 LinkedIn post and only started working for BrainChip in October 2023? If he had already been that excited about our company prior to being laid off at Meta, they might even have been able to offer him a new position from August onwards, a smooth transition from Meta to BrainChip without a paycheck missing. Of course I have no idea whether it was possibly a deliberate decision of Chris Jones to pick October as the start date for his new job (maybe he wanted to spend quality time with his family between jobs, go on a long vacation, rest and recharge, renovate the house or perhaps he was suffering from an illness, was taking care of elderly relatives or was grieving for a loved one etc) or whether there was simply no earlier job vacancy for his position at BrainChip, but the two month gap between jobs could just as well signify that he didn’t yet know about BrainChip’s offerings by the time he started looking for a new job and that they were possibly not even his first choice.
Ultimately, everything - and that includes FF’s reading - is speculation, unless we hear it from the horse’s mouth. Can we at least agree on that?
