While it is perfectly conceivable that Meta could be exploring BrainChip’s offerings behind an NDA wall of silence, I don’t see any conclusive evidence at present that we are indeed engaged with them.
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In my opinion, FF is once again jumping to conclusions.
He is basing his reasoning for adding Meta to his personal list of BrainChip’s engagements on a supposed fact, namely that Chris Jones was introduced to BrainChip and TENNs
while working at Meta, even though this premise has not been verified - it is merely FF’s interpretation of the following quote (from 3:18 min, my transcript):
“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.”
It is a hasty judgement to draw the conclusion that the above quote necessarily expresses simultaneity rather than considering the alternative - posteriority.
Chris Jones himself does not explicitly state that he was introduced to BrainChip and TENNs while working for Meta (picture BrainChip staff giving a power point presentation at Meta’s premises).
Rather, this is what FF read into his words.
But there is another way to interpret that quote; one, which makes more sense to me:
When I started watching the video of Chris Jones’s presentation on TENNs, my immediate thoughts were that a) BrainChip had sent an excellent speaker to the 2024 Embedded Vision Summit in May to replace Nandan Nayampally (who had originally been scheduled to give that talk), and b) how job loss can turn out to be a blessing in disguise.
What FF doesn’t seem to be aware of is that Chris Jones had been affected by one of Meta’s 2023 mass layoffs. It must have been the April 2023 round, as in his LinkedIn post below he mentions over 4000 other employees sharing his fate as well as the fact that he had been with the company for only 11 months. This aligns with his employment history on LinkedIn, according to which he started as a Senior Product Technical Program Manager at Meta in June 2022.
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Under California law (the so-called WARN Act) companies over a certain size need to give affected employees at least 60 days advance notice in case of significant workforce reductions, which in combination with a severance pay package would account for Chris Jones’s LinkedIn profile stating he was with Meta until July 2023, even though he appears to have been laid off in April 2023.
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Judging from the practice observed with other US tech giants handling domestic layoffs, it is however highly likely that from the day the layoff was communicated, the affected employees would - with immediate effect - no longer have had any access to their company emails, computer files and confidential information, despite remaining on the company payroll for another two to four months (depending on their respective severance pay packages).
And unless Meta was an EAP customer of BrainChip at the time (for which there has never been any indication whatsoever), Meta employees would not have been privy to any details about TENNs prior to BrainChip’s white paper publication on June 9, 2023 - weeks after Chris Jones had found out about being laid off and had since presumably been cut off from the company’s internal communication channels and flow of information.
So chances are he did not develop his enthusiasm for BrainChip and TENNs in his role as Senior Product Technical Program Manager at Meta - but rather while job hunting post-layoff!
Luckily for both Chris Jones as well as BrainChip, getting introduced to each other seems to have turned out a win-win situation.
Chris Jones is clearly an asset to our company from what I can tell through him presenting in public, and hopefully he will be able to proudly tell his daughter one day that when she was a toddler, he turned a job loss into an immense gain by serendipitously discovering what BrainChip had to offer.
And who knows - maybe Chris Jones has been/is/will be the one introducing BrainChip to his former Meta colleagues. But as for now, Meta stays off my personal (virtual) list of BrainChip’s engagements.
DYOR.
but I’ve got a few $$$$ at the ready and holding off for a bit 
