Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google • Hacker News Board

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#41

Post by Locke1689 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

boucher wrote: post #34

Locke1689 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's always been interesting to me that someone publishing a paper in computer science (especially someone working at a University) would not want to open source the code that produced those results. It's the best kind of repeatable experiment. I recently went looking for any code published by Hinton, since I've been doing some neural network research as a hobby, but was unable to find any at all.

You'll probably have to contact him (or the graduate student who did the work, realistically), but if you do you'll probably get it.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#42

Post by cjbprime » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:34 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…

For what it's worth, I was thinking the same thing. I don't feel this way about Google hiring programmers in general, but I think at this point they've hired some significant double-digit percentage of the world-class machine learning professors in the world, and as I understand it those people don't publish (many) papers anymore.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#43

Post by oscargrouch » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:35 AM UTC

kvb wrote: post #35

oscargrouch wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont get me wrong.. google is much better than its "predecessors" in that field.. eg: microsoft, apple, ibm.. but in the end is only one company, with its capital open in the stock market, with boards and everything else.. while google now is half good/half evil.. who can garantee that in the future when larry and sergey goes away.. that the company wont be ruled by a Larry ellison clone? ps: while google have a pret…

I think this is unfair to at least Microsoft Research, which as far as I know has outpublished Google by a wide margin. (Full disclosure - I'm a contractor working on F#-related stuff at MSR)

ok ,mea culpa. the research part of microsoft is pretty decent.. even i have already stop by and read some of those good papers.. :)

but the point i was made was about open culture.. and since google publish much more(and heavy weight) open source software than microsoft i tend to think they are ahead in the curve at least in that matter..

but with the current trends of online education model our academic institutions are in threat, at least the classic model we used to know.. so this make even more dangerous if corporations are the only safe place to big minds to continue their work..

so while companies are getting more open.. in this hypothetical future.. i think this is not enough.

Companies by their own standards dont have to think about the society greater good. they can, but they dont have to.. contrary to what academia and republics were created for

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#44

Post by ok_craig » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:38 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…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking.

I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb.

Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other interesting things. Many of them do serious intellectual research.

My impression of Google's leadership, employees, and choice of projects often leads me to believe that they sell ads so they can continue making really cool stuff - not that they try to come up with cool stuff so that they can sell ads.

I also disagree with the whole premise that goal-oriented or profit-driven intellectual study is in some way less pure, less worthy, less boundary-pushing, or more short-sighted than purely academic study. How does the initial incentive for a thought affect whether or not the conclusions from that thinking are new knowledge about our universe? It doesn't.

As long as he's not sacrificing what he does to become a paper pusher, which he isn't doing, I don't see how it's different. And I think ultimately the closer his study is to being manifested in real things that we use, the faster his knowledge will be refined towards the path of truth, and the faster humanity will actually learn and benefit.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#45

Post by willis77 » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:38 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.

Have a look for your self:

http://research.google.com/pubs/MachineLearning.html

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#46

Post by haberdasher » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:40 AM UTC

cjbprime wrote: post #42

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…

For what it's worth, I was thinking the same thing. I don't feel this way about Google hiring programmers in general, but I think at this point they've hired some significant double-digit percentage of the world-class machine learning professors in the world, and as I understand it those people don't publish (many) papers anymore.

http://research.google.com/pubs/ArtificialIntelligenceandMac...

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#47

Post by niggler » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:51 AM UTC

In contrast to many who think that people are being shepherded to the search business, I wonder if Google is trying build a new "Bell Labs"-type research division, in which case this is good news.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#48

Post by wtallis » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:52 AM UTC

ok_craig wrote: post #44

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…

The common lament about Google being just a place that optimizes ad clicks is overused, and lazy thinking. I don't even think it's a conclusion that's the result of actual thought anymore, just reverb. Google is a big company. It would not even be worth it or effective to have every single engineer dedicated to this ad click business. There's a team for that, and there are lots of other teams, for lots of other inter…

Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#49

Post by simonster » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 1:53 AM UTC

notatoad wrote: post #28

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.

There's also the fact that Google likely has more computing power than any other organization worldwide, which is what seems to be the attraction for Hinton, at least according to the last sentence of his post.

Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google

#50

Post by simonster » Wed, Mar 13, 2013, 2:04 AM UTC

tristanz wrote: post #31

This is exciting for Hinton I'm sure, but also somewhat worrying for broader community. Hinton has always been very open with his research: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-adv... One of the most striking aspects of the research led by Dr. Hinton is that it has taken place largely without the patent restrictions and bitter infighting over intellectual property that characterize high-technology…

I doubt Google will stop Hinton from publishing, and I think both will still benefit greatly from that arrangement. Larry and Sergey published "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" before they were even incorporated, and it doesn't seem to have hurt them much.