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

181–190 of 328 posts

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#181

Post by refulgentis »

crazygringo wrote: post #80
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…

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.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#182

Post by epolanski »

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.

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.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#183

Post by asdfman123 »

snapcaster wrote: post #101
asdfman123 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried PaLM? I work for Google and have been playing with it. It’s pretty good. The decision to release Bard, an LLM that was clearly not as good as ChatGPT, struck me as reactive and is why people think Google is behind. I’d think so too if I had just demoed Bard.

No, but would love to try it. I'm using these models 20-30 times a day throughout the average work day for random tasks so have a pretty good sense of performance levels. Didn't think it was available to public yet but just saw it's apparently on google cloud now, i'll have to try it out. How do you compare Palm with GPT4 if you've had a chance to try both?

Seems pretty similar. In general Google LLMs seem better suited for just conversation and ChatGPT is built to honor “write me X in the style of Y” prompts.

The latter is more interesting to play around with, granted, and I think it’s an area where Google can catch up, but it doesn’t seem like a huge technical hurdle.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#184

Post by asdfman123 »

potatolicious wrote: post #142
asdfman123 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Google could have easily not have shared its technology. However, the bloat problem you’ve described are difficult problems to solve, and are to some degree endemic to large businesses with established products.

> "Well, Google could have easily not have shared its technology." Sure, but the idea is that if they didn't share their technology, they'd still be in the same spot: they would have invented transformers and still not shipped major products around it. Sure maybe OpenAI won't exist, but competitors will find other ways to compete. They always do. So at best they are very very slightly better off than the alternative,…

True, but they only feel the fire now, and you can tell they’re rapidly trying to productionalize stuff like you’ve described. It will take time though.

They were too risk averse before.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#185

Post by epolanski »

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 would never trust or hire people that wash their laundry publicly like this.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#186

Post by vore »

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?

Broadly, section 7 of the NLRA, but it is not spelled out in the text of the act. Instead, Quicken Loans, Inc. v. NLRB established the precedent that discussing working conditions is not a violation of confidentiality: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-q...

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#187

Post by dekhn »

alphabetting wrote: post #180
dekhn wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X exists as a press-release generation system, not as a real technology creation system. They onboard many impractical projects that are either copies of something being done already in industry ("but with more Google and ML!") or doesn't have a market (space elevators).

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 if google could ever sell (as a product, as an IP package, etc) what they've created because it depends so deeply on a collection of technology google makes available to waymo.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#188

Post by kergonath »

hgsgm wrote: post #170
kergonath wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We love automation. There is just too much to do, and the field is unbounded. More automation means more papers and more interesting science.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#189

Post by cubefox »

jeffbee wrote: post #99
snapcaster wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing this, but Bard sucks so badly when i've tried to use it like GPT-4 or compare results its like night and day. What makes you so confident they have "secret" LLMs that are superior?

Bard is in full-scale production to all U.S. users for free. GPT-4 costs $20/month. Rather a big difference in the economics of the situation. Also it's pretty clear that even the $20 is highly subsidized. Microsoft is willing to incinerate almost any amount of money to harm Google.

GPT-4 is also free to all users, not just from the US, with 200 turns per day and 20 per conversation. It's just called "Bing Chat mode" instead of GPT-4. Of course Microsoft is losing money with it. But Microsoft can afford to lose money.

Re: Why did Google Brain exist?

#190

Post by pama »

dekhn wrote: post #148
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…

As somebody who has crossed the line between ML and chemistry many times, I would love to see: more ML researchers who know chemistry, more chemistry researchers who know ML, and best of all, fully cross-disciplinary researchers who are both masters of chemistry and ML, as those are the ones who move the field farthest, fastest.

Present. I think there exist many of us. Chemistry is a very wide field though, so not sure if organic synthesis vs theoretical chemistry vs physical chemistry vs biochemistry will end up more useful to help tackle drug discovery problems or other chemistry applications. Same with ML I suppose; even though the specialties are less concrete nowadays, the breadth of publications has far exceeded the breadth of modern chemistry.
Post reply on HN