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Why did Google Brain exist?

moderndescartes.com

111–120 of 328 posts

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controvery of what? Did you read Gebru's paper? For instance, her calculation of carbon footprint of training BERT assumes that companies will train BERT 24x7. Gebru is a disgrace to the community because she always, I mean literally always, attacks her critics by motives. You think bias is a data problem? You're a bigot (See her dispute with LeCun). You disagree with my assessment on an ML model? You are white male…

Ok but the lack of underrepresented minorities in the field and the important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish? We need more than just white male / Chinese male / Indian male monoculture “STEM lords”. This is already recognized in fields like medicine, where minorities treating minorities results in better outcomes and the greater push to open posit…

> important role people like Gebru played in extending the political and status of minorities is ok to extinguish?

No, she didn't. Attacking everyone for baseless motives and identities is the worst kind of activism. She alienated people by attacking them without basis. She disdained those who truly fought for the fairness and justice of every race. She left a bad taste in people who truly cared about progress. Yes, it's totally worth "extinguishing" her role, as her role is nothing but a political charade.

As for under-repented minorities, do you even know the Chinese Exclusion Act? Do you know how large the pipeline of the STEM students in different races and why there was a gap? Do you know why the median GPA of the high school students in the inner city was 0.5X out of 4? Why was that? The questions can fill a book. Yeah, activism is easy, as long as you have the right skin and shameless attitude. Solving real problems is hard.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#112

> Neither side “won” this merger. I think both Brain and DeepMind lose. I expect to see many project cancellations, project mergers, and reallocations of headcount over the next few months, as well as attrition. This merger will be a big test for Sundar, who has openly admitted years ago to there being major trust issues [1]. Can Sundar maintain the perspective of being the alpha company while bleeding a ton of talen…

The merger will fail.

If 5000 people are not enough to do things, 10000 people will unlikely change that.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#113

> I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared... I'm really baffled by how people think it's OK to write public accounts of their previous ( and sometime current! ) employers' inner workings. This guy got paid a shitload of money to do work and to keep all intern…

The primary purpose of an NDA is to allow the company to enforce trade secrets: the existence of the NDA is proof that the company took steps to maintain the secrets' secrecy. Nothing in this blog post looks like a trade secret to me; rather, it's one person's fairly high-level reflections on the work environment at a particularly high profile lab.

While he technically may have violated the NDA, it's really hard for me to see any damage or fallout from this post. It's gentle, disparages only at the highest levels of abstraction, doesn't name names, etc. I don't think it makes sense to view it in a moralistic or personal integrity light. Breach-of-contract is not a moral wrong, merely a civil one that allows the counterparty (Google) to get damages if they want.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#115

> I sat on it because I wasn’t sure of the optics of posting such an essay while employed by Google Brain. But then Google made my decision easier by laying me off in January. My severance check cleared... I'm really baffled by how people think it's OK to write public accounts of their previous ( and sometime current! ) employers' inner workings. This guy got paid a shitload of money to do work and to keep all intern…

I've been quite careful not to divulge anything confidential, and anything that is remotely close to sensitive has publicly accessible citations. My opinions about Google are tantamount to discussions about workplace conditions, and it would be very bad for society if ex-employees were not allowed to discuss those.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#116
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the article and thought he did a fine job of not spilling too many secrets - I'm curious what you thought he said that crossed the line? I'm not personally aware of signing something that says "I'll keep all internal details private" though I agree I'd be highly unlikely to refer to anyone below the SVP level by name -- but I think that's exactly what OP did?

True, this wasn't the most egregious. But the principle still applies. He said himself he held this back until his final check cleared.

A large company acting out spite towards a former employee has happened more than a couple times. Minimizing that risk seems entirely reasonable.

As others have said, I really don't see anything that's especially private in the article. The author wrote in pretty general terms.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#117
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google never talked much about it externally, but Google Research (the predecessor to Brain) had a single project which almost entirely funded the entire division- a growth-oriented machine learnign system called Sibyl. What was sibyl used for? Growing youtube and google play and other products by making the more addictive. Sibyl wasn't a very good system (I've never seen a product that had more technical debt) but i…

In case anyone is wondering what Sibyl is all about, here's a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SaZ5UAQrQM

Yep- that goes into a fair amount of detail. Sibyl was retired but many of the ideas lived on in TFX. I worked on it a bit and it was definitely the weirdest, most technically-debt-ridden systems I've ever seen, but it was highly effective at getting people additicted to watching Youtube and downloading games that showed ads.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#118
post #2

because once Jeff Dean had solved Google's maslow problems (scaling web search, making ads profitable, developing high performance machine learning systems) he wanted to return to doing academic-style research, but with the benefit of Google's technical and monetary resources, and not part of X, which never produces anything of long-term value. I know for sure he wanted to make an impact in medical AI and felt that b…

Waymo?

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#119
post #118
post #2

because once Jeff Dean had solved Google's maslow problems (scaling web search, making ads profitable, developing high performance machine learning systems) he wanted to return to doing academic-style research, but with the benefit of Google's technical and monetary resources, and not part of X, which never produces anything of long-term value. I know for sure he wanted to make an impact in medical AI and felt that b…

Waymo?

waymo hasn't produced anything of long-term value yet. And everything about it that worked well wasn't due to Google X

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#120
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically nothing has spun out of it to benefit Google Quite a ridiculous statement. Google has inserted ML all over their products. Maybe you just don't notice, to their credit. But for example the fact that YouTube can automatically generate subtitles for any written language from any spoken language is a direct outcome of Google ML research. There are lots of machine-inferred search ranking signals. Google Sheet…

> Quite a ridiculous statement. Google has inserted ML all over their products. Maybe you just don't notice, to their credit. But for example the fact that YouTube can automatically generate subtitles for any written language from any spoken language is a direct outcome of Google ML research. There are lots of machine-inferred search ranking signals. Google Sheets will automatically fill in your formulas, that's in-h…

> It provided Google with essentially zero value.

Or rather, it provided enormous value. The failure was for Google to actually capture more than a tiny fraction of that value.

No amount of engineering brilliance is going to save Google as long as the management is dysfunctional.

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