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The Google employees who created transformers

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Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#151

Post by mistrial9 »

nostrademons wrote: post #103
elevatedastalt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice story, but Google's heyday was probably 10 years before that. By 2014 the decline had already started.

A little after that. I'd put the heyday between 2003-2010, starting with the GMail launch and ending with the Chrome & Android launches. That period includes GMail, Maps, Scholar, Orkut, Reader, the acquisitions of Blogger/YouTube/Docs/Sheets/Slides/Analytics/Android, Summer of Code, OAuth, Translate, Voice Search, search suggestions, universal search, Picasa, etc. Basically I can look at my phone or computer and bas…

GMail, the service that tells every user that they will be indexed and profiled personally for ad leads? that is an achievement ?

GMail was one of the red flags for many that "don't be evil" was not going to be what it appeared. History says that this kind of mass profiling never ends well.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#152

Post by bitcharmer »

dpflan wrote: post #119
Thaxll wrote: post #93

It's pretty crazy to think that Google is not OpenAI today, they had deep mind and an army of PHDs early on.

What is OpenAI today? Can you elaborate? Google is a varied $trillion company. OpenAI sells access to large generative models.

Sure, Google is worth more but they essentially reduced themselves to an ad business. They aren't focused on innovation as much as before. Shareholder value is the new god.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#153

Post by samatman »

pksebben wrote: post #98
IncreasePosts wrote: post #63

Earlier 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

> less welcoming to immigrants than the US Not sure if we can claim this any more, what with texas shipping busloads of immigrants to NY and the mayor declaring it a citywide emergency, and both major parties rushing to get a border wall built.

Conflating illegal and legal immigration is not a useful contribution to this conversation.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#154

Post by tarsinge »

xnx wrote: post #105

> Not only were the authors all Google employees, they also worked out of the same offices. Subtle plug for return-to-office. In-person face-to-face collaboration (with periods of solo uninterrupted deep focus) probably is the best technology we have for innovation.

> with periods of solo uninterrupted deep focus

Which is usually impossible in the office. So more like a mix, which is what all reasonable people are saying.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#155

Post by amanda99 »

whatever1 wrote: post #18

I am all in for allowing tax free bloated RnD departments just with the hope that once in a decade idea will propell the overall economy. The marvel of modern computing is a result of RnD bloat that was done without immediate impact to the bottomlines of their own companies.

I mean this is how the US operates. Other countries continually try to refine their existing industries and societal structures. In the US, you let everything rot and hope that a hail Mary innovation comes out of somewhere and creates a breath of fresh air. It creates quite a wild society, but it seems to have worked for now!

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#156

Post by dpflan »

bitcharmer wrote: post #152
dpflan wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is OpenAI today? Can you elaborate? Google is a varied $trillion company. OpenAI sells access to large generative models.

Sure, Google is worth more but they essentially reduced themselves to an ad business. They aren't focused on innovation as much as before. Shareholder value is the new god.

Agreed that Friedman cursed the market with "shareholder theory", and it is a totally subversive and corrupting concept because whatever will increase value is accepted because it's the doctrine.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#157

Post by pksebben »

samatman wrote: post #153
pksebben wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> less welcoming to immigrants than the US Not sure if we can claim this any more, what with texas shipping busloads of immigrants to NY and the mayor declaring it a citywide emergency, and both major parties rushing to get a border wall built.

Conflating illegal and legal immigration is not a useful contribution to this conversation.

The phrasing was "welcoming to immigrants", not "welcoming to the ever shrinking definition of good immigrants established by a bunch of octogenarian plutocrats".

"Illegal" is a concept - it's not conflating to assume that it's not the bedrock of the way people think.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#158

Post by empath-nirvana »

Thaxll wrote: post #93

It's pretty crazy to think that Google is not OpenAI today, they had deep mind and an army of PHDs early on.

The problem is that chatting with an LLM is extremely disruptive to their business model and it's difficult for them to productize without killing the golden goose.

Re: The Google employees who created transformers

#159

Post by cjbprime »

lelag wrote: post #139
cjbprime wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantized models could absolutely be run in-car. They can already be run on cell phones.

If you plan on letting llava-v1.5-7b drive your car, please stay away from me. More seriously, for safety critical applications, LLM have some serious limitations (most obviously hallucinations). Still, I beleive they could work in automotive application assuming: high quality of the output (better than current SoA) and very high token count (hundreds or even thousand of token/s and more), allowing to bruteforce the…

Could combine the existing real-time driving model with influence from the LLM, as an improvement to allow understanding of unusual situations, or as a cross-check?

I wasn't intending to say it would be useful today, but pushing back against what I understood to be an argument that, once we do have a model we'd trust, it won't be possible to run it in-car. I think it absolutely would be. The massive GPU compute requirements apply to training, not inference -- especially as we discover that quantization is surprisingly effective.

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