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Why did Google Brain exist?

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Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#161

Post by anonymouskimmer »

khazhoux wrote: post #158
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, in the most bold words I can think to phrase this: You're betraying the citizens and lawful residents of your country by not informing them of what to expect should they accept a job at one of these companies. Have fun with your 30 pieces of silver ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_pieces_of_silver ). > and I believe that if someone doesn't like them, they should not sign them to begin with,…

> Do you, at least, believe that confidentiality agreements should be broken if it is to make the police or public aware of a crime? How about a civil infraction, such as a hostile working environment? Absolutely. I referenced whistleblowing in my original post above. This isn't a such a case.

Does this apply to people who infiltrate what they believe are corrupt companies with the expectation of digging up dirt, and thus sign the confidentiality agreements with the expectation of violating them?

Does this apply to moral wrongs, which are technically legal (e.g. cruel conditions at animal farms)?

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#162

Post by liuyipei »

Google has good engineers and a long history of high throughput computing. This, combined with a lack of understanding what ML research is like (versus deployment), led to the original TF1 API. Also, the fact that google has good engineers working in a big bureaucracy probably hid a lot of the design problems as well.

TF2 was a total failure, in that TF1 can do a few things really well when you get the hang of it, but TF2 was just a strictly inferior version of pytorch, further plagued by confusion due to TF1. In alternate history, if Google pivoted in to JAX much earlier and more aggressively, they could still be in the game. I speak as someone who has at some point knew all the intricacies and differences between TF1 and TF2.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#163

Post by seatsniffer »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #157
seatsniffer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's something I hadn't heard about. Is there any particular reason for this?

It's become somewhat of a meme, where Schmidhuber seemingly tries to claim credit for nearly everything. I _think_ it's because he published ideas back in the 90s or so that weren't fully executable/realized at the time, and later people figured out how to actually flesh them out do it, and supposedly didn't cite him appropriately/enough. Often the ideas weren't exactly the same - but rather he claims they're derivat…

Thanks for taking the time to explain. I'll check out the link also.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#164

Post by whymauri »

tdullien wrote: post #38
vl wrote: post #4

>PyTorch/Nvidia GPUs easily overtaking TensorFlow/Google TPUs. TF lost to PyTorch, and this is Google’s fault - TF APIs are both insane and badly documented. But nothing comes close to performance of Google’s TPU exaflop mega-clusters. Nvidia is not even in the same ballpark.

TF in its first version was stellarly misdesigned. It was infuriatingly difficult to use, particularly if you were of the "I just want to write code and have it autodiffed + SGDed" school, I found it crazy to use Python to manually construct a computational graph...

Python is the least of my concerns with Tensorflow... especially TF 1.0. What a mess it was, and kinda still is.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#165

Post by [deleted] »

jll29 wrote: post #156
khazhoux wrote: post #59

> 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 checked with some Google friends who told me their contract even makes it illegal to tell anyone that they work for Google (no joke). One side is what's in the papers you signed and the other side is to what extent the terms can be enforced. But you have a point in that it would be good professional practice to wait for a decade before disclosing internals especially when names of people are dropped...

[deleted]

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#166

Post by light_hue_1 »

sp332 wrote: post #146
light_hue_1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Automatic subtitles and translation is actually a huge feature which is very useful to the many people that don't speak English. It definitely did provide Google with a lot of value. It lost Google immense value. Before Google Brain the only speech recognizers that halfway worked were at Google, IBM and Amazon. And Amazon had to buy a company to get access. After Google Brain, anyone can run a speech recognizer. On…

But little startups are not threatening YouTube. And now they are paying money to Google for the use of Google Brain.

You can run your speech recognizer on AWS, you don't need to give Google a cent.

Whatever comes after YouTube, if it's a startup or not, it will have top-notch captioning, just like YouTube. Google gave up a massive competitive advantage with huge technical barriers.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#167

Post by light_hue_1 »

loudmax wrote: post #120
light_hue_1 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, I don't disagree at all that Google Brain provided enormous value for society. Just like Xerox PARC. Both of them were a massive drain on resources and provided negative value for the parent company.

And I agree, it's not Google Brain's fault. Google's management has been a disaster for a long time. It's just amazing how you can have every advantage and still achieve nothing.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#168

Post by dekhn »

dgacmu wrote: post #145
dekhn wrote: 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…

I generally agree with this though with some tweaks. I think Jeff wanted to do something that he thought was both awesome (he's liked neural networks for a long time - his undergrad thesis was on them) and likely to have long-term major impact for Google, and he was able to justify the Awesome Thing by identifying a way for it to have significant potential revenue impact for Google via improvements to ad revenue, as…

It grew from the scrappy group to the mega-powerhouse by combining a number of things: being the right place at the right time with the right resources and people. They had a great cachet- I was working hard to join Brain in 2012 because it seemed like they were one of the few groups who had access to the necessary CPU and data sets and mental approaches that would transform machine learning. And at that time, they used that cachet to hire a bunch of up and coming researchers (many of them Hinton's students or in his sphere) and wrote up some pretty great papers.

Many people outside of Brain were researchers working on boring other projects who transferred in, bringing their internal experience in software development and deployment, which helped a lot on the infra side.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#169

Post by antipaul »

selimthegrim wrote: post #90
kgwgk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they don’t need “ML people”? Computational biology has been a thing for a while.

Well they had a whole suite of presentations at NeurIPS that suggests they hired a bunch.

https://www.gene.com/scientists/our-scientists/prescient-des...

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#170

Post by hgsgm »

kergonath wrote: post #159
dr_dshiv wrote: post #7

Lots of great insight. Here’s one: “Given the long timelines of a PhD program, the vast majority of early ML researchers were self-taught crossovers from other fields. This created the conditions for excellent interdisciplinary work to happen. This transitional anomaly is unfortunately mistaken by most people to be an inherent property of machine learning to upturn existing fields. It is not. Today, the vast majority…

> I’ve seen repeatedly that it’s much harder for a ML PhD to learn chemistry than for a chemist to learn ML I can confirm. We regularly look for people to write some computational physics code, and recently for people using ML to solve solid state physics problems. It’s way easier to bring a good physicist or chemist to a decent CS level (either ML or HPC) than the other way around.

This is because software developers are too good at automation themselves out of a job.
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