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A Year at Google Brain (2020)

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Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#41

Post by eitland »

JCDenton2052 wrote: post #25

Of particular note: "Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai (who believes AI is “more profound than electricity or fire”) has emphasized that Google is an “AI-first” company, with the company seeking to implement machine learning in nearly everything do" Nearly everything they do with your data.

The original is actually more correct it seems.

IMO they are clearly betting (parts of) the farm on this as can be seen by the (often) ridiculous results many of us have witnessed in both search results quality and ad matching quality.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#42

Post by vincentmarle »

ubercore wrote: post #28
snejad123 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: When paired with a robotic medium, we'll be able to automate most pattern driven jobs like construction, welding, surgery, anything really that doesn't require human element to it and is more of a pattern matching behavior. This is extremely revolutionary and will put a ton of people out of work. Any pattern-dependent job that does not require human interaction will be at risk, even coding (as…

This is a wildly optimistic take on what AI can accomplish, and a misunderstanding of the difficulties in all those tasks. If AI can do the first set of jobs, it will be able to replace sales people, cops, and lawyers too. But there's nothing, yet, to indicate that there isn't a wide gulf between the current state of the art and the kind of generalized intelligence you're talking about.

Besides, the more imminent threat to "our jobs" is not artificial intelligence but the brutal combination of globalization and the increasingly effortless ability to work remotely. If it doesn't matter anymore where the person behind Slack or Zoom is located, then why should they be in the same country. Before AI catches up to our jobs, the jobs will already have been taken away from us by the forces of globalization.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#43

Post by herodoturtle »

ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age

Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience.

Would you mind telling us which technical field? And which country?

I know several PhD students / recent grads that pursued this qualification primarily because of "academic inflation" - that in order to compete for top-paying jobs in the EU, the more qualified you are the better, and having "just a Masters degree" is no longer good enough.

I should add, these are also ex-pats, who left their developing country in pursuit of greener pastures. But it seems to be the case that getting a PhD - as terrible as the experience might be - can also help with career prospects, purely because one has a PhD (irrespective of the details of their thesis topic).

Whereas back home (in said developing country), it's the complete opposite. Qualifications hardly matter - or they certainly don't matter as much - only experience does. And given the thin supply of skilled labour, business owners have the mindset of "we'll take what we can get".

So I do think the choice to pursue a PhD can be an indirectly strategic move depending on your job prospects - and less about the actual topic you plan to research.

Just my 2 cents from a developing country that is experiencing excessive brain-drain! :)

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#44

Post by superbcarrot »

ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route.

They might be able to contribute technically but they might not be given the opportunity to do so if they don't have a PhD.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#45

Post by joeberon »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #30
supersereneblue wrote: post #6

I have nothing of value to add except that seeing someone do what they love and enjoy, greatly warms my heart. Good luck with everything Akshay!!

Really? If anything it makes me really angry. I generally despise seeing people happy, especially people that have gotten everything in life (as someone that has definitely not ). What an interesting way to view the world...

What an incredibly weird niche account

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#46

Post by ramraj07 »

herodoturtle wrote: post #43
ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age Hey there, thanks for sharing your experience. Would you mind telling us which technical field? And which country? I know several PhD students / recent grads that pursued this qualification primarily because of "academic inflation" - that in order to compete for top-paying jobs in the EU, the more qualified you are…

I also moved from India to the US to do a PhD in biomedical engineering! In the end I left the field and took up a tech job after my PhD because it became clear that this is the more sensible career choice. Given I put in 8 years of some of my most productive years into the PhD, I think I’d have been a much different place in tech if I had just made the jump earlier. The PhD helped but not nearly as much as the same number of years of actual experience in tech itself.

Of course if you can’t or won’t program and want to be in a hard science a PhD might be necessary but it’s become generally annoyingly competitive and fruitlessly bureaucratic to be in the field and depend on it for long term guaranteed career growth. When I said tech I meant software-related: as long as you are interested or willing to be there it still seems the best place to make money without too much sweat and not need a PhD to do it.

This also applies only if you’re good but not cream of the crop. If you’re doing a PhD under a superstar and have nature papers then you’re clearly set up well, but anything lower than that it’s not worth the competition and pain you need to put in to make a good career either in academia or industry.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#47

Post by drivebycomment »

throwawaygh wrote: post #32
Waterluvian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities Woof.

It's an important reality to understand. I did my PhD in an in-demand field at a top uni. My partner did their PhD in a less in-demand field at a not so top uni. The difference in our experiences -- and how those experiences were directly impacted by the financial motivations of the department/university -- was beyond staggering. My partner was cheap teaching labor. I was a source of fellowship+grant money and potent…

> Academia is no longer sheltered from the shitty labor politics of finance capitalism.

It never was. And politics in general, not just labor.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#48

Post by sandgiant »

ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

It sounds like you've had a very different PhD experience than I did. Perhaps a difference in fields? My PhD in physics was probably the most humbling experience I've had in my professional life. I went from thinking I knew everything to learning that I knew nothing. To me that's one of the most important parts of a research education, to become aware of what you don't know and be provided tools to try figuring it out.

The most disconcerting part for me was coming back to society, realizing that no one actually knows what's going on most of the time, even when they think they do. I wish more people had the same humbling experience I did (not saying, by the way, that we need more PhD students, just the similar experience).

It's curious why you'd think that the only reason for doing a PhD is to contribute faster. Contribute faster to what? The author says he's having a lot of fun with his PhD because he gets to work on topics that are not immediately tied in with Googles business model.

This is exactly why we need PhD students doing fundamental research, because no one can see the immediate benefit. Because on the surface it has no value at all - so who else would look at it if not curious PhD students with little to no financial incentives.

Constraining possible research breakthroughs to what someone thinks is valuable a-priori, seems very naive and counter productive to me.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#49

Post by exdsq »

supersereneblue wrote: post #6

I have nothing of value to add except that seeing someone do what they love and enjoy, greatly warms my heart. Good luck with everything Akshay!!

I always get so excited when reading about Brain, X, Parc, etc... But sadly I just don’t have the academic background to get into one of those places :(

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#50

Post by nine_k »

ISL wrote: post #27
jonas21 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1850, few people felt that electricity was particularly profound either. That year, William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday replied, "One day sir, you may tax it." [1]. The electric motor had been invented (by Faraday), but it couldn't do any useful work and had to sit in a pool of mercury to function. Electric lighting had been invented, but the…

There are almost seven times as many people alive today as there were in 1850 -- we may be in 1850, but the number of clever people driving advances is substantially larger.

They are also spread over a substantially larger spectrum of scientific disciplines.

There was no ML in 1850, and the word "tensor" was invented in 1846. No biochemistry, no genetics, no quantum mechanics.

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