This is super interesting. How would I go about working with these guys, considering that they're in Palo Alto and I'm in London? I understand there's a bunch of hops you have to jump through in terms of visas, but I've never really looked into it.
These guys may be based in California but Google has a London office, and if you want to work on deep learning then Google DeepMind is the obvious place to go and they're based in London as well.
For some reason I just assumed that all the more "serious research" was done in California and completely forgot about DeepMind.
Actually a significant portion of the tech team (for instance Content ID) is based in Zurich, not in San Bruno. Check out their jobs page [0]. You don't need a friend to recommend you, but it would be great if you find somebody on a team that you are interested to join that would root for you.