It was an interesting read, but he also links to that misinformed article about indirect costs.
Why did Google Brain exist?
251–260 of 328 posts
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#252> 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 can't imagine being such a sucker that you care this much about your former employer? You're like a housebroken dog.
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#253Earlier 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...
TF1 was pretty rough to use, but beat the pants off Theano for usability, which was really the best thing going before it. Sure it was slow as dirt ("tensorslow") even though the awkward design was justified on being able to make it fast. But it was by far the best thing going for a long time. Google really killed TF with the transition to TF2. Backwards incompatible everything? This only makes sense if you live in a…
>Google really killed TF with the transition to TF2. Backwards incompatible everything?
They did the same thing with their AngularJS -> Angular switch. The main asset (community knowledge) was lost and React ate their lunch.
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#254Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Society is not structured to encourage this. Getting a job sooner is more lucrative. Any breakthough you make having studied for a couple of decades is property of a corporation not you.
> Society is not structured to encourage this. I wish more people understood this and the value that it would add to society. For some reason most people understand how roads and transit improve commerce, but fail to understand how education and social support for the individual does as well.
Sport incentives work out nicely for getting a supply of top talent. Big money through sponsorship/ads/tickets, fairly formulaic system to get better at a sport (top coaches/teams, get fitter, practice a lot), an easy way to identify progress (wins games, scores goals).
But for sciences, someone could do great work for 20 years and produce obscure papers that might stay obscure, or may unlock the mystery of the universe or help us meet the world's energy demands without pollution! So the pay off if magnitudes higher than sport, but magnitudes less probable. Someone will run 100m fast, guaranteed, but will we solve science problems X Y Z and when?
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the same reason analysts come from math rather than economy degrees. You can teach a mathematician what he needs to know about finance, you can hardly do the opposite.
That’s the opposite of what OP is observing. It’s easier to teach a domain expert “good enough” quantitative and technical skills than to teach a pure quant “good enough” domain expertise (and the corresponding intuition)
You just decided that one of those expertises is the "domain" while the other is not. There's no reason at all to pick one of them.
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#257I 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…
Would you say the majority (super majority?) of Google Brain and DeepMind employees are happy about the merge?
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#258Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
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…
Crazy that her boss and people she mentored all loved her. It’s almost like the system screwed her and she’s rightly angry at it.
I get it, easier to type cast her as an angry black woman though!
Re: Why did Google Brain exist?
#260I 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…
I'm having trouble keeping Brain/Brian straight.
Monty Python's Life of Brain