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A Year at Google Brain (2020)

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Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#61

Post by sytelus »

jonas21 wrote: post #26
arduinomancer wrote: post #4

> While I’m interested in machine learning, I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire This seems a not too uncommon experience among CS people where machine learning loses its interest once they understand the magic

In 1850, few people felt that electricity was particularly profound either. That year, William Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked Michael Faraday why electricity was valuable. Faraday replied, "One day sir, you may tax it." [1]. The electric motor had been invented (by Faraday), but it couldn't do any useful work and had to sit in a pool of mercury to function. Electric lighting had been invented, but the…

I can use exact same analogy to prove that horseshit is next electricity. I don’t know why people do reasoning by analogies and why people accept analogies for reasoning.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#62

Post by sytelus »

akshayka wrote: post #5

I didn't expect to see this here! Happy to answer questions. (There's also a discussion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/akshaykagrawal/status/136827691658779443... )

I am sure you need to stay politically correct but do you see places where Google Brain can do better or improve further?

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#63

Post by sytelus »

akshayka wrote: post #22
vincentmarle wrote: post #13

> I’m not convinced that today’s AI is anywhere near as profound as electricity or fire @akshayka can you elaborate a bit more on why you think that

Modern ML certainly has some cool applications, but none seem revolutionary. Can you list any that are?

When you demo some tech to 5 year old and he mistakens it for magic, I think it’s revolutionary enough. In current state of art, Atari RL, AlphaGo, AlphaFold, GPT3, GANs, Pix2pix, CLIP, DeepFakes etc are very very revolutionary. You can take any of these and go back in time even just 15 years ago, people won’t believe what was accomplished.

However, I do believe we are far and away from generalized intelligence.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#64

Post by tchalla »

ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

> But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who ever did a PhD (including me). If someone says “don’t do it” and your reaction is to not even follow up with questions perhaps you should acknowledge you already know why they’re saying that!

One my favourite quotes

> “I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” — Charlie Munger

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#65

Post by wilperkins »

petercerno wrote: post #59

I once did Convex Optimization course with Stephen Boyd and it was totally amazing! I think it is still available here: https://www.edx.org/course/convex-optimization and the e-book https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/ is also freely available. I am quite jealous. :) Good luck with your PhD!

This course was great

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#66

Post by ramraj07 »

superbcarrot wrote: post #44
ramraj07 wrote: post #3

Great post. An interesting aphorism I used to spout was “to never listen to a first year PhD student sing praise of their PhD experience.” Though that was aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities not at people who can just choose to work at Google Brain if they feel like it. But ignoring that one persons warning about PhD still sounded like he had the typical arrogance contained by every person who eve…

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route. They might be able to contribute technically but they might not be given the opportunity to do so if they don't have a PhD.

In hard sciences that might be true but I doubt it’s necessary in tech - see George Hotz.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#67

Post by ramraj07 »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #34
Waterluvian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>aimed at commodity phd students in regular universities Woof.

Yikes, jesus christ. I wonder what they think of people at "regular companies" like mine or people that graduated from "regular schools".

I myself graduated as one such commodity PhD student, and I don’t consider it as a derogatory term, mere reality. Contrast to regular jobs, the PhD nowadays is more like the arts where the top candidates disproportionately reap the benefits. If you’re not at a top tier university or a star advisor your academic prospects are middling from the beginning. Not saying you can’t make it happen, a lot of my friends do, but it’s a slog and the system is biased against you. In the end there’s limited money and you’re directly competing the stars I just talked about before. Some people are just monumentally better at everything so it’s just not fun competing with a very small pie at hand.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

meetups323 wrote: post #17

> For example, my coworkers let me take the lead in writing an academic paper about TensorFlow 2, even though my contributions to the technology were smaller than theirs. Sounds like some folks didn't like writing! :)

The relevant question isn't who wrote the bulk of a paper - it's whose name appears first on the list of authors :).

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#69

Post by superbcarrot »

ramraj07 wrote: post #66
superbcarrot wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s still not clear to me a person of this cadre need a PhD in a technical field in this day and age; they might contribute just as much faster if they chose any other route. They might be able to contribute technically but they might not be given the opportunity to do so if they don't have a PhD.

In hard sciences that might be true but I doubt it’s necessary in tech - see George Hotz.

Hotz is kind of doing his own thing at comma.ai. If I founded my own company, I'm sure they would hire me for anything that I applied for.

Re: A Year at Google Brain (2020)

#70

Post by killtimeatwork »

dougb5 wrote: post #54

> [Sundar Pichai] has emphasized that Google is an “AI-first” company Maybe I need to lighten up here, but I find this "AI-first" branding to be really off-putting. What I fear it means is "We're going to add the world's biases and a bit more unpredictability into every single one of our features." And in some ways it's like like a carpenter deciding to become a "wrench-first" operation. Shouldn't the first priority…

It reminds me of my managers talking about "focusing on moving to the cloud", without any real analysis whether it makes sense from technical or cost standpoint. It's purely hype driven.
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