And none of them still work for Google. It’s truly baffling that Google’s CEO still has a job after how badly he fumbled on AI.
Among other things (like cloud for instance). I always think Sundar is the Steve Ballmer of Google.
The Google employees who created transformers
81–90 of 258 posts
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#82Of note: “ Six of the eight authors were born outside the United States; the other two are children of two green-card-carrying Germans who were temporarily in California and a first-generation American whose family had fled persecution, respectively.”
The more interesting thing to me is that only one of them went to an elite American undergrad (Duke). Rest went to undergrads in India, Ukraine, Germany, Canada (UToronto has a 43% acceptance rate).
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that not immediate grounds for his termination? The board should be canned too for allowing such an obvious charlatan to continue ruining the company.
Two judgements were made to my knowledge: 1) Google enjoyed significant market status at the time and a leap forward like seemingly semi conscious AI in 2019 would be seen as terrifying. Consumer sentiment would go from positive to “Google is winning to hard and making Frankensteins monster” 2) it didn’t weave well into googles current product offering and in fact disrupted it in ways that would confuse the user. It…
The first time I met with Eric Schmidt he asked what I did (harvest idle cycles to do scientific calculations), and then we talked about how Google was slowly getting into cloud. I remember him saying "I've tried to convince the board that the cloud is the future of growth for google, but they aren't interested" (this was before GCS and GCE launched).
The second time I met him I presented my project (Google Cloud Genomics) to the board of the Broad Institute, of which he was a member (IIRC the chair) and he was excited that Google was using cloud to help biology.
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#84And none of them still work for Google. It’s truly baffling that Google’s CEO still has a job after how badly he fumbled on AI.
He was too distracted with all the other things going on under his watch. He spent too much time trying to convince rank and file that it's OK to do business with customers they don't like, trying to ensure arbitrary hiring goals were made, and appeasing the internal activists that led protests and pressured to exit people that didn't fall in line. This is why the CEO of Coinbase sent the memo a few years back statin…
How has he been appeasing internal activists? He's been pretty clear about firing them
Edit: I'm also unclear on what makes you think he's spending much time on "arbitrary hiring goals". I remember an initiative for hiring in a wider variety, also conveniently much cheaper, locations but there wasn't indication he was personally spending time on it
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#85Of note: “ Six of the eight authors were born outside the United States; the other two are children of two green-card-carrying Germans who were temporarily in California and a first-generation American whose family had fled persecution, respectively.”
Why would that be of note, especially in America? I think it would be an interesting observation in China or Japan, or some other country which is generally less welcoming to immigrants than the US
Because there are plenty of people in the US who are neither immigrants nor the children of immigrants. In fact, they're probably a significant majority. So to have 8 out of 8 be members of the smaller set is rather unlikely.
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, but it is weird to use "modern" here. Modern suggest a longer timeframe. I would say machine learning deep NNs is modern AI. It's just not true that everything not transformer is outdated, but it is "kinda" true that everything not deep NN is outdated.
> It's just not true that everything not transformer is outdated. Am not expert, do you have some links about this? i.e. a neural net construction that outperforms a transformer model of the same size.
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Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would that be of note, especially in America? I think it would be an interesting observation in China or Japan, or some other country which is generally less welcoming to immigrants than the US
First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population. The fact that the entire team consists effectively of first generation immigrants says something, probably both about higher education and American culture.
> First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population.
About 1/8 of the US population is foreign-born, which is a minority but not a tiny one. In California, its over a quarter.
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population. The fact that the entire team consists effectively of first generation immigrants says something, probably both about higher education and American culture.
> First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population Not in California. Last I remember, something like a quarter of the state’s population is foreign born.
It looks like you are roughly right, but still, a sampling of 8 students from this population is not likely to come up that way (by my calculation 1.4x10^-7)
> All Students in Higher Education in California
> 2,737,000
> First-Generation Immigrant Students
> 387,000
14% are first-generation immigrants
from: https://www.higheredimmigrationportal.org/state/california/
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population. The fact that the entire team consists effectively of first generation immigrants says something, probably both about higher education and American culture.
> First generation immigrants are still a tiny minority of the population Not in California. Last I remember, something like a quarter of the state’s population is foreign born.
That's still a 1-in-4^8 = 1-in-65536 longshot.
Re: The Google employees who created transformers
#90And none of them still work for Google. It’s truly baffling that Google’s CEO still has a job after how badly he fumbled on AI.
Well, ads are doing well.