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

Why did Google Brain exist?

moderndescartes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 328 posts

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#191

Post by bubblethink »

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…

> a betrayal of former teammates who now have to deal with the fallout.

What fallout is this ? Did you sign a contract with him ? If you are harmed by it, why don't you seek legal recourse ? Your entire rant started with some NDA stuff, and in the end you say, "legal issues aside". This is like the "Having said that" move from Curb. You start with something, then contradict yourself completely with "Having said that". If you have a contractual grievance, seek it. If not, you are grieving on the internet, just like he is.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#192

Post by seizethecheese »

refulgentis wrote: post #181
crazygringo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know he was paid to keep all internal details private after he leaves? Do you have knowledge of the employment contract, can you share the relevant language with us? All he says is his concern about "optics", which has nothing to do with contract. If Google has a problem with his post, they can go after him, but that's an issue between Google and him, not with you or me or the rest of the internet. I'm def…

This is a hopelessly naive misunderstanding framed as obvious disloyalty, I want to buy calls on your career in middle management.

You mean puts?

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#193

Post by anonylizard »

gowld wrote: post #175
simonster wrote: post #125

I work for Google Brain. I remember meeting Brian at a conference and I have nothing but good things to say about him. That said, I think Brian is underestimating the extent to which the Brain/DeepMind merger is happening because it's what researchers want. Many of us have a strong sense that the future of ML involves models built by large teams in industry environments. My impression is that the goal of the merger i…

The goal of the merger is for execs to look like they are doing something to drive progress. Actual progress comes from the researchers and developers.

Well, where exactly is this progress? Where is Google's answer to GPT-4? Why weren't the 'researchers and developers' making a GPT-4 equivalent?

Turns out you sometimes you need a top down, centralised vision to execute on projects. When the goal is undefined, you can allow researchers to run free and explore, now its full on wartime, with clear goals (make GPT-5,6,7....).

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#194

Post by refulgentis »

seizethecheese wrote: post #192
refulgentis wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a hopelessly naive misunderstanding framed as obvious disloyalty, I want to buy calls on your career in middle management.

You mean puts?

nah calls, very in line with what _sounds_ good even when naive and misinformed

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#195

Post by mechagodzilla »

leoh wrote: post #118
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…

Waymo?

Waymo is kind of like DeepMind - they're costing Alphabet billions of dollars a year for a decade+ with no appreciable revenue to show for it, but they're working on something neat, so surely it must be good?

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#196

Post by alphabetting »

dekhn wrote: post #187
alphabetting wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo has developed the modern autonomous vehicle from the ground up. It's basically a matter of scale now. It's a mindblowing tech stack. The first time riding in one is much more otherwordly than using GPT for the first time. The value of the technology is far greater whatever PR they have generated (not many people know about it)

I have infinite respect for the process that Waymo followed to get to where they are. And I'm impressed that Google continued to fund the project and move it forward even when it represents such a long-term bet. but it's not a product that has any real revenue. and most car companies keep their distance from google self-driving tech because they're afraid. afraid google wants to put them out of business. It's unclear…

I was just disputing "X exists as a press-release generation system, not as a real technology creation system." Definitely agree the path to profitability will be tough.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#197

Post by anonymouskimmer »

iamdamian wrote: post #179
anonymouskimmer wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General working conditions are not "internal info"; it is beneficial to society to discuss working conditions (which can be pretty detailed), and is thus a protected activity under various laws. Nothing in any contract can obviate this lawful right (and, to some, a basic duty of citizenship, since the country is more important than any single company within the country). At best contracts can highlight what is privil…

Now you have me curious. Which laws, specifically?

The big one in the USA is the National Labor Relations Act, but this generally applies to group action. However, such group action can be literally publically posting about a job's work conditions.

Here's a list of recent state laws in Washington, Oregon, and Maine, which prohibition certain kinds of NDAs (oriented toward unlawful activity, not general speech rights): https://www.foley.com/en/insights/publications/2022/07/sever...

Contracts are required to be 'reasonable' for both parties. This puts limits on the ability to constrain in a contract. I don't know how much this reasonableness standard is statutory or judicial.

For public-sector employees there's some protection under the first amendment. https://www.workplacefairness.org/retaliation-public-employe...

And in Connecticut this free speech protection transfers to private-sector employees too: https://law.justia.com/codes/connecticut/2005/title31/sec31-...

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/free-speech-and-express...

https://www.pullcom.com/working-together/there-are-limits-to... > there is no statutory protection if the employee was only complaining about personal matters, such as the terms or conditions of employment. The employee has to show that he was commenting on a matter of public concern, rather than attempting to resolve a private dispute with the employer.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#198

Post by 1024core »

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...

There's a reason why the TL behind TF (Rajat Monga) got booted out.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#199

Post by kenjackson »

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…

Chemistry is a centuries old discipline, that people study undergrad a full four years before getting a PhD in the field of chemistry.

ML is a, practically speaking, 15 year old field that PhDs often begin to study after a couple of AI courses in undergrade and a specific track in grad school (while they study other parts of CS as part of their early graduate CS work).

There's just way less context in ML than Chemistry.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#200

Post by piecerough »

1024core wrote: post #198
tdullien wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

There's a reason why the TL behind TF (Rajat Monga) got booted out.

What's this based on?
Post reply on HN