One of Microsoft’s most distinguished engineers Blaise Agüera y Arcas is joining Google. Arcas will join the machine learning team at  Google. Arcas confirmed the rumors today, but did not offer further comment on his reasons for jumping ship.

According to a report by the NY Times, a top engineer and software designer at Microsoft has left the company to join its rival Google. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the man behind the development of Microsoft’s Bing Maps service and most recently the Photosynth 3D panorama app, has apparently joined Google and will work on “machine learning.”