The sneaky way Big Tech is acquiring AI unicorns without buying the companies

Microsoft, Google and Amazon along with other tech companies have been getting creative in how they’re poaching talent from top artificial intelligence startups.

Earlier this month, Google signed an unusual deal with 

 to hire away its prominent founder and more than one-fifth of its workforce while also licensing its technology. It looked like an acquisition, but the deal was structured so that it wasn’t. Google wasn’t the first…