61–70 of 188 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you, but just for the sake of it: What AI research has had business value from Google in the last years that you could sell?
AlphaFold may bring millions if not billions to DeepMind, Google and Alphabet. Figuring out structure of a single protein may cost up to 100 000 dollars. Bert as applied to search from late 2019: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/search/sea...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hear hear. These clickbaity article titles are tiresome. Thanks for saying it like it is.
Please read the article. I address some of the issues raised. My point is that Gebru's firing is symptomatic of some deep problems Google are experiencing. Thank you.
This is a very badly written and uniformed article, and sentences like these essentially illustrate the thinking here (It's imploding because I don't like it).
Here is an alternative reading: Google is cleaning house of toxic activists who are not interested in serious ethics research but use it as a vehicle for their ultra-progressive political agendas.
No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
> All of us are replaceable That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.
That's not to say these weren't great minds, but the concepts where in the air and the race to formalize them was on; most of the "second places" are today forgotten or their contribution diminished from the modern "winner takes all" mentality, but none of them existed in a vacuum.
The history of science is fraught with independent discoveries, from calculus to the the telephone, up and including mass energy relation and the basis that later became quantum mechanics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
AlphaFold may bring millions if not billions to DeepMind, Google and Alphabet. Figuring out structure of a single protein may cost up to 100 000 dollars. Bert as applied to search from late 2019: https://www.google.com/amp/s/blog.google/products/search/sea...
Time will show; winning the competition was just the first step.
It normally takes some 10 to 20 years for basic research to produce profits.
mRNA vaccines are technology from 1990 and are first time used commercially on mass scale on humans 30 years later.
No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
I believe you, but just for the sake of it: What AI research has had business value from Google in the last years that you could sell?
No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
To be fair, the article is not about the firing. In any case, the two researchers who got fired did more harm to Google than good. Internally no one cares they left. AI etichs is an esoteric academic research field.
No. Every time someone makes a big stink about someone getting fired at one of the top tech companies, it is promptly followed by an article like this. A trillion dollar company that hires thousands of researchers and consistently produces some of the highest quality research with real results is not going to implode from one person being gone. Another pattern I've seen is someone leaving a company, followed by writi…
> All of us are replaceable That's a management illusion. Try to replace e.g. someone like Fabrice Bellard, Mike Pall or Claude Shannon. Of course such things happen in big companies, but mostly because management is too limited to properly assess the true value of certain individuals. But the article is actually about a different topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hear hear. These clickbaity article titles are tiresome. Thanks for saying it like it is.
Please read the article. I address some of the issues raised. My point is that Gebru's firing is symptomatic of some deep problems Google are experiencing. Thank you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am the author. I think it is interesting with this "axe to grind" response (there was another above). I am an independent researcher, a professor at a University. And I have absolutely no reason to be disappointed with Google. My knowledge of this subject goes considerably deeper than I write in the article, but it is important to get the points across in an easy to follow manner. Thus I use certain literary device…
Ha ha *no agenda, I mean. ..... Maybe my subconscious has an agenda I don't know about :-)
Google AI, Google Brain, and Deepmind are all different groups at Google with different mandates and research goals. While what's happening in the Ethical AI team is troubling, it's rather a large and unfounded leap that it'll affect research productivity for the other teams.
Digging deeper the article is confusing and sometimes plain wrong on its assessment of AI research. Broadly the deep learning and RL approach to AI has been critiqued for its lack of semantic and symbolic understanding. These are not Google specific and the articles examples of this are terrible.
The first example of limitations of AlphaZero on Montezuma's revenge is a bad example. The author implies that RL failed because it didn't understand ladders. But later approaches still solved this using by using stochastic exploration strategies and not introducing conceptual knowledge to the model as the article implies is the key limitation.
On the language modelling, its weird the article cites GPT3 as problematic given that GPT3 was developed at OpenAI's research and not Google. Also GPT3 is pretrained using next word prediction which only consider left context and is far more limited that BERT which considers bi-directional context and produces richer word level embeddings. That being said the Stochastic Parrots paper does specially critique BERT.
But it's not a new critique. Emily Bender, the other major co-author, is a computational linguist who has always been critical of deep learning approaches to NLP. Bender along with Gary Marcus and many others have called for AI that considers symbolic and linguistic knowledge and have been critical of purely data-driven deep learning approaches. Stochastic Parrots is not new in its critique of large language models, it just provides newer evidence specific to the current state of language model research.
So I'm not sure how any of this is a signal that Google AI is imploding. The broader trends in AI is not just throw more compute and make bigger models. It just happens that large models works well for OpenAI and Google for specific problems. Google also has one of the largest knowledge graphs and there is open line of research that combines symbolic knowledge from KG with deep learning methods. There is also active research both at Google and elsewhere that aims to add more make current deep learning approach more "intelligent" by using linguistic and symbolic knowledge.
I'm confused as to how Google AI research is imploding. Google PR attempting to censor Stochastic Parrots (which was still published) because of bad PR optics has nothing to do with active research questions elsewhere at Google Brain, Deepmind, and Google AI.