Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 111 posts

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#51

Post by leereeves »

chubot wrote: post #36
guelo wrote: post #11

I find it strange that probably the most successful and influential compiler and PL developer in a generation doesn't seem to be interested in compilers or PL anymore.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

Makes me wonder if Google is working on a programming language for machine learning...

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#53

Post by corporateslave3 »

leereeves wrote: post #51
chubot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

Makes me wonder if Google is working on a programming language for machine learning...

This actually blows my mind. I know that probabilistic languages exist, but something very interesting could be done here.

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#55

Post by seanmcdirmid »

chubot wrote: post #36
guelo wrote: post #11

I find it strange that probably the most successful and influential compiler and PL developer in a generation doesn't seem to be interested in compilers or PL anymore.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

Jeff Dean got his PhD under Craig Chambers doing PL work; Sanjay Ghemawat was also a compiler guy, they went on to mapreduce and I think, at least Jeff Dean, is heavily involved in Tensorflow.

Google hires a lot of PL PhDs to do work that isn't very related to PL (we joke about PL PhDs working on ads a lot). One could guess that they just make good developers because of their experience, but the specific knowledge might not be much in demand.

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#56

Post by thechao »

santaclaus wrote: post #39
chubot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

> which is pretty crazy C++ metaprogramming in its own right Expression templates aren't that crazy, in the grand scheme of C++ meta programming.

But they are the ur-crazy.

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#57

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Jtsummers wrote: post #19
jorgemf wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a machine learning researcher I have to say that you should join us too! AI is the future! PL is an area with big challenges, but AI has even bigger challenges and the impact in the society is bigger, much bigger, too. I would change the question and ask why anyone shouldn't be interested in AI?

Because not every problem can be solved by AI.

I'm more interested in IA (intelligence augmentation) actually, which seems to overlap with PL nicely.

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#58

Post by mathperson »

eanzenberg wrote: post #7

Super interesting developments.. Also, re: >AI can't democratize itself (yet?) so I'll help make it more accessible to everyone! This needs to happen more on the software side. You can buy a world-class quad-gpu machine for about half the cost of a vehicle. You can build a world-class single-gpu machine (what I have) for a fifth of that. It's literally amazing how accessible the hardware is, compared to almost any ot…

I mean...you can't make math simpler. like...math is math. you can create resources that make it easier to teach math (and for the record high quality textbooks on AI/ML ABOUND). I think you want software and libraries so you can build things without understanding the math. To some degree this already possible (see my english major linkedin friends playing withs sci-kit etc etc). Fundamentally though, I think you need at least some basic understanding of the mathematics to interpret results/create new ideas. Arguing otherwise is like saying you can code without knowing what a queue is...I mean sure you can probably create something that compiles and runs but your horizons will be more narrow than someone with a full computer science education and grounding. just like trying to do ml without at least some understanding of the math is like a blind man trying to open a door.

case-in-point: I am on hn right now because my research is going badly because I am using another researcher's code and I don't fully understand the correspondence between the paper and the code. I am getting terrible results on some multi-class classification (i.e. approximately random). I am not sure if I am using some wrong parameters or because the signal I am looking for doesn't exist in the data. Not knowing at least some mathematics would make this a LOT harder

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#59

Post by chubot »

leereeves wrote: post #51
chubot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

Makes me wonder if Google is working on a programming language for machine learning...

That's what TensorFlow is. It happens to use the Python interpreter as the front end, and for metaprogramming, but the language has its own semantics (see the paper above).

You could probably an invent your own syntax for it (and I'm sure someone has), but that's a small part of the picture.

Re: Chris Lattner Joins Google Brain

#60

Post by chubot »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #55
chubot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an obvious overlap between programming languages and machine learning at Google: TensorFlow. For example, see "A Computational Model for TensorFlow" https://research.google.com/pubs/pub46196.html There are tons of interesting things going on in TensorFlow from a programming language perspective. It has optimization at the low level, like CUDA and SIMD back ends via the Eigen library [1] (which is pretty craz…

Jeff Dean got his PhD under Craig Chambers doing PL work; Sanjay Ghemawat was also a compiler guy, they went on to mapreduce and I think, at least Jeff Dean, is heavily involved in Tensorflow. Google hires a lot of PL PhDs to do work that isn't very related to PL (we joke about PL PhDs working on ads a lot). One could guess that they just make good developers because of their experience, but the specific knowledge mi…

Right and Craig Chambers later joined Google. He led/developed Flume [1] (a Java framework on top of MapReduce) and the unfortunately named Cloud Dataflow [2] (which aims at unifying streaming and batch computation)

I say unfortunate because pretty much all the big data frameworks could be called "cloud dataflow", including TensorFlow itself.

People using Google Cloud might recognize the name of VP Urs Hoezle, who worked on the OO language Self in the 90's with a lot of the same people [3].

And AFAIK that's where v8 came from... Urs hired his former colleague Lars Bak and told him to write a fast JavaScript interpreter for Chrome.

[1] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub35650.html [2] https://research.google.com/pubs/pub43864.html [3] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=619798

Post reply on HN