There's a huge Google lab in Zurich [1], probably that's why.

[1] https://careers.google.com/locations/zurich/

I'm a bit sad but I guess I could have seen it coming ;-).

https://github.com/muellermichel/guetzli

Although Zurich's software engineers are as expensive as those in the Bay area, Google employs 1500 of them and they bought a new building next to the main train station to hire hundreds of new ML / AI experts.

(Full disclosure: I am a programmer and I try to match programmers with Zurich's startups for a living.)

So, if you want to move to Zurich, you find my e-mail address in my HN-handle. Read more about Switzerland in my semi-famous blogpost "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in tech": https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...)

I'm Swiss German and don't understand half of the Swiss German dialects. Swiss German must be the ultimate hard case for machine translation.

I'm assuming it's because the work originated in their R&D labs in Zurich?