Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#21

Post by dannyr » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

kolektiv wrote: post #3

Sigh. I don't know whether I'm alone in being saddened that many of the excellent thinkers of our time, who once might have spent their lives probing the the very limits of our comprehension in their field, now end up comfortably turning their minds to the services of (in the long term) rather short sighted commercial ends. I can imagine that this sentiment is probably against the prevailing HN mood, but I've been th…

I read the book "In The Plex". A lot of academicians joined Google mainly because they wanted to get an actual product/service out into the hands of people instead of just doing research or writing papers.

I have a different reaction than you. It's good to see brilliant minds stepping outside of the academia and join a commercial entity to actually build something.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#22

Post by oscargrouch » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

Google is sucking all the talent and the brain of the world.. i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers and open source software..

Or the world will enter into a dark age of knowledge, ruled by huge corporations, and everybody else having to share the crumbs that fall of the table..

I hope that not all big minds fall of for companies.. or at least that companies start to commit with knowledge shareing to the rest of the world

we should stop black box knowledge companies or we are doomed in the long term.. (like the coke secret recipe case)

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#23

Post by yuhong » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:32 AM UTC

OGinparadise wrote: post #18

balakk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that Google has had the largest impact on information dissemination , since the invention of pen and paper. Advertising is just a means for providing comfortable livelihoods to these excellent people. There's no better place for these people to be working. We got some spectacular output when some bright folks ended up working together in a phone company, better than any university. Why not Google?

Not the means, it's the end, and everything feeds to that. Especially search with their "updates," Chrome, Android, UI etc. Hinton has his work cut out, make users click on ads! Looks like playing with colors has been milked already. " I would argue that Google has had the largest impact on information dissemination , since the invention of pen and paper. " Because they are a search engine and is used by most people.…

Ah, OGinparadise is the same one who posted that Expedia has lowest prices, despite it's problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4965868

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#24

Post by Locke1689 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:33 AM UTC

jarek wrote: post #13

jiggy2011 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair , google are doing a lot more than "making people click on ads". There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there. Google also serves the purpose of amplifying the power of great (and not so great) minds by putting so much information at their fingertips. The ads part is just what writes the cheques.

> There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there. Does the research get published or otherwise make it outside of the Googleplex? Serious question.

To be honest... kind of. They release papers but most of the layers at the bottom are Google proprietary. Certainly the source code is proprietary. Hell, even most of the information about GFS is proprietary, despite having a successor. From an academic perspective, their disclosure is kind of crap.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#25

Post by cs702 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:38 AM UTC

Something really interesting must be happening with AI at Google, because in the past few months both Ray Kurzweil (the best-known proponent of the singularity) and Geoff Hinton (the crazy-talented individual who invented deep-belief networks using interconnected "restricted Boltzman machines"[1]) have joined the company.

--

[1] For an overview of deep belief networks, see these videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyzOUbkUf3M , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdIURAu1-aU , and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DleXA5ADG78

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#26

Post by mayank » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:41 AM UTC

oscargrouch wrote: post #22

Google is sucking all the talent and the brain of the world.. i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers and open source software.. Or the world will enter into a dark age of knowledge, ruled by huge corporations, and everybody else having to share the crumbs that fall of the table.. I hope that not all big minds fall of for companies.. or at least that companies start to commit with knowledge…

> i wish at least that the efforts would get published in new papers

You mean like this very large list? http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html

> and open source software

Or this also very large list? https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#27

Post by mayank » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:42 AM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #2

So is Google now more appealing to academics than academia?

It certainly appears to be. Here's a former Harvard prof who wrote a pretty interesting blog post: http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#28

Post by notatoad » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:43 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #25

Something really interesting must be happening with AI at Google, because in the past few months both Ray Kurzweil (the best-known proponent of the singularity) and Geoff Hinton (the crazy-talented individual who invented deep-belief networks using interconnected "restricted Boltzman machines"[1]) have joined the company. -- [1] For an overview of deep belief networks, see these videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

I think it's pretty clear what's so interesting: google has the some of the largest datasets ever assembled, on a hugely diverse range of subjects. If you want to play with that data, you've got to work for google. Probably the only other place you get to play with that much data is at the NSA, and their goals are a bit less fun than google's.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#29

Post by naner » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:44 AM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #2

So is Google now more appealing to academics than academia?

I imagine Google pays a better. By a wide margin.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#30

Post by DannyBee » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 12:47 AM UTC

Locke1689 wrote: post #24

jarek wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There must be a lot of genuinely cutting edge research into machine learning,classification,NLP etc going on in there. Does the research get published or otherwise make it outside of the Googleplex? Serious question.

To be honest... kind of. They release papers but most of the layers at the bottom are Google proprietary. Certainly the source code is proprietary. Hell, even most of the information about GFS is proprietary, despite having a successor. From an academic perspective, their disclosure is kind of crap.

Plenty of academic research papers don't have code either.

"Hadoop was derived from Google's MapReduce and Google File System (GFS) papers."

So apparently the disclosure was good enough to give you that :)

http://www.slideshare.net/jbellis/cassandra-open-source-bigt...

Shows that cassandra is based on the bigtable paper, among others (hbase i believe was as well).

Their disclosure is apparently good enough to get folks going ...

FWIW: In reading 20 years of compiler papers, i've had more luck getting code for papers from commercial companies than academics. It's become somewhat better over time, but plenty of universities still seem completely unwilling to give code to papers.