I have read George Clinton, it would have been a better headline.
Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#62Slightly off-topic, but I wonder what Dijkstra would feel about the state of CS research if he came to the present time.
Hot topics now seem to be statistical ML stuff, and not the deterministic mathematical proofs that he was an advocate of.
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#63[deleted]
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.
To the extent that they don't have that kind of credibility (I think I agree with your assessment) whatever the eventual result of Hinton joining the team should say something very strong about whether or not they will. If he finds that he isn't getting what he wants out of it, I think we can expect him to leave. If he ends up staying it is evidence that Google can hold the interest of the sort of people you would ex…
The dozen or so Bell Labs alumni working at Google is also evidence that Google can hold the interest of the sort of people you would expect to find at places like Bell Labs. :)
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So when is the last time that PARC or Bell Labs produced anything of note? Seriously. 15 or 20 years?
You can only rest on laurels for so long before they dry up and blow away.
Google meanwhile is an incredible company. Are you saying you know better than Hinton where the real progress is being made?
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#66Sigh. 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…
On the contrary, I think these are symptoms of machine learning coming of age [or getting industrialized]. I am not sure "short sighted commercial ends" are the main motivator for likes of Prof. Hinton to shift, but rather the availability of vast amount of data and opportunity to understand them in a scale which was not previously possible.
To bring out the real magic out of techniques like deep learning ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning ), availability of large training sets and the infrastructure required to crunch them are a pre-requisite. Once you have that, it is turning out to be a different ball game all together http://deeplearning.net/2012/12/13/googles-large-scale-deep-.... It turns out that groups like google research are the ones at present which have access to such dataset and infrastructure.
I also predict the reverse shift to happen within few years, once the interesting fundamental research problems has been tackled such people might move back to universities. If that happens, that is indeed a healthy process of academica and industry supplementing each other.
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.
So when is the last time that PARC or Bell Labs produced anything of note? Seriously. 15 or 20 years? You can only rest on laurels for so long before they dry up and blow away. Google meanwhile is an incredible company. Are you saying you know better than Hinton where the real progress is being made?
I think most people considered the spin off into Lucent to be the true end of what Bell Labs was. There hasn't effectively been a Bell Labs since 1997.
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#68Poor grad students :-/ Anyway, if you are unfamiliar with his work, here's Hinton't Deep Learning Saga ;) for your enjoyment: www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlXzufEk-2E
Don't worry about them. He's still remaining attached to University of Toronto part-time specifically because of his remaining graduate students[1].
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google simply hasn't been around long enough to earn the kind of credibility that Bell Labs and Xerox PARC had.
So when is the last time that PARC or Bell Labs produced anything of note? Seriously. 15 or 20 years? You can only rest on laurels for so long before they dry up and blow away. Google meanwhile is an incredible company. Are you saying you know better than Hinton where the real progress is being made?
> So when is the last time that PARC or Bell Labs produced anything of note?
Some—perhaps many—of their alumni now work at Google doing cool things. For example, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike created Go at Google.
Re: Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
So when is the last time that PARC or Bell Labs produced anything of note? Seriously. 15 or 20 years? You can only rest on laurels for so long before they dry up and blow away. Google meanwhile is an incredible company. Are you saying you know better than Hinton where the real progress is being made?
I think most people considered the spin off into Lucent to be the true end of what Bell Labs was. There hasn't effectively been a Bell Labs since 1997.
The true end of Bell Labs was when Lucent started financing customer purchases. They were carrying dot com bubble debt on their books as if it were a solid asset. When the music stopped they had spent their actual assets to the brink of destruction.